Thomas De Quincey, best known for his book Confessions of an
English Opium Eater, was a journalist and propagandist of Empire,
of oriental aggression, and of racial paranoia. The greater part of
the fourteen volumes of his collected writings concerns the
history, the colonial development, and increasingly the threat
presented by the Orient in all its manifestations—human, animal,
and microbiological. This remarkable book, which is an account of
De Quincey’s fears of all things oriental, is also an
extraordinary analysis of the psychopathology of mid-Victorian
imperialist culture. Â John Barrell paints a picture of De
Quincey as a happy family man, apparently at ease with himself and
with the rest of the world, but in fact harboring and expressing
the most ferocious and brutal denunciation of Orientals of all
kinds and dreaming of exacting from them a terrible retribution.
Barrell shows that throughout De Quincey’s writings there is a
repeated story of the murder or violation of a female
victim—either within or outside De Quincey’s family—by an
oriental criminal This story finds its way into almost everything
he wrote: the various versions of his autobiography, his novels and
short stories, his biographical and critical writings, his essays
on politics, history, and science. Barrell attempts to understand
this European terror of the East by an approach that is both
historical and psychoanalytic. In particular, he explores the
relation between childhood anxiety and imperial guilt in a body of
writing in which the fear of violence within the family is imaged
as a fear of the oriental, and the private and the public, the
sexual and the imperial, the feminine and the exotic are endlessly
intertwined. Â This book will be fascinating reading for
those interested in Victorian literature, in psychoanalysis and its
relation to literature, in the history of imperialism, and in
debates about the characteristics and effects of colonial
discourse.
General
| Imprint: |
Yale University Press
|
| Country of origin: |
United States |
| Release date: |
June 1991 |
| First published: |
June 1991 |
| Authors: |
John Barrell
|
| Dimensions: |
234 x 156 x 20mm (L x W x T) |
| Format: |
Hardcover
|
| Pages: |
288 |
| ISBN-13: |
978-0-300-04932-9 |
| Categories: |
Books
Promotions
|
| LSN: |
0-300-04932-3 |
| Barcode: |
9780300049329 |
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