De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission

Margaret Russett uses the example of Thomas De Quincey, the nineteenth-century essayist best remembered for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and his memoirs of Wordsworth and Coleridge, to examine the idea of the ‘minor’ author, and how it is related to what we now call the Romantic canon. The case of De Quincey, neither a canonical figure nor a disenfranchised marginal author, offers a point of access to specifically Romantic problems of literary transmission and periodisation. Taking an intertextual approach, Russett situates De Quincey’s career against the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge; the essays of Lamb, Hazlitt, and other writers for the London Magazine; and discourses of ethics and political economy which are central to the problem of determining literary value. De Quincey’s Romanticism shows how De Quincey helped to shape the canon by which his career was defined.