ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the kind of implicated criticism that emerges in the new magazine, parallel to, and yet qualitatively different from the pragmatic mode of the Noctes. De Quincey's first written contributions to a magazine, the London Magazine, in 1821, were autobiographical in nature, and this fact alone can be taken as emblematic of his predicament, that is, the predicament of identity for one who had hoped to arrive at coherence and unity but was forced into fragments by the generic demands of the periodicals market. De Quincey's critic is more concerned with communicating power than knowledge. Often, the "unawakened" elements that his autobiographical writing communicates consist of scenarios concerned with the possibility of accessing other's interiority. De Quincey's idea of good style is based upon the inseparable blending of manner with substance. The latter is much closer to Benjamin Humphrey Smart's pragmatic vision of language, which depicts all communication as emerging from a rhetorical toolbox.
