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'I took it: - and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what
an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an
apocalypse of the world within me!' Thomas De Quincey's Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater (1821) launched a fascination with drug
use and abuse that has continued from his day to ours. In the
Confessions De Quincey invents recreational drug taking, but he
also details both the lurid nightmares that beset him in the depths
of his addiction as well as his humiliatingly futile attempts to
renounce the drug. Suspiria de Profundis centres on the deep
afflictions of De Quincey's childhood, and examines the powerful
and often paradoxical relationship between drugs and human
creativity. In 'The English Mail-Coach', the tragedies of De
Quincey's past are played out with horrifying repetitiveness
against a backdrop of Britain as a Protestant and an imperial
power. This edition presents De Quincey's finest essays in
impassioned autobiography, together with three appendices that are
highlighted by a wealth of manuscript material related to the three
main texts. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's
Classics has made available the widest range of literature from
around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's
commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a
wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions
by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text,
up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
‘Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!’ Confessions is a remarkable account of the pleasures and pains of worshipping at the ‘Church of Opium’. Thomas De Quincey consumed large daily quantities of laudanum (at the time a legal painkiller), and this autobiography of addiction hauntingly describes his surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings though London, along with the nightmares, despair and paranoia to which he became prey. The result is a work in which the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory and imagination are seamlessly interwoven. Confessions forged a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, paving the way for later generations of literary drug-users from Baudelaire to Burroughs, and anticipating psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious. This edition is based on the original serial version of 1821, and reproduces the two ‘sequels’, ‘Suspiria De Profundis’ (1845) and ‘The English Mail-Coach’ (1849). It also includes a critical introduction discussing the romantic figure of the addict and the tradition of confessional literature, and an appendix on opium in the nineteenth century.
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