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Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey cover

Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

Frances Wilson

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Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

Guilty Thing tells the riches-to-rags story of a dazzlingly complex and troubled figure, whose life was lived on the run, and affords De Quincey the literary biography he deserves. The last of the Romantics, Thomas De Quincey is a name synonymous with scandal. Modelling his character on Coleridge and his sensibility on Wordsworth, De Quincey took over the latter's former cottage and turned it into an opium den. Here, in the throes of his high, he nurtured his growing hatred of his former idols and wrote the notorious and fascinatingly strange essay 'On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts'. Despite never achieving the literary deification of his contemporaries, his narrative style – scripted and sculptured emotional memoir – was to inspire generations of writers: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf. James Joyce knew whole pages of his work off by heart and he was arguably the father of what we now call psychogeography.

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Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing
Year
2016
ISBN-13
9781408839768
Genre
Biography & Memoir
Topics
Literary biographyRomantic era writersOpium addiction

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