ABSTRACT
Contemporary critical neglect of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, a work which addressed the issues of compulsion and dependence in a challenge to what its author considered as the flawed voluntarism of the “High Romantic argument,” is perhaps all the more remarkable given the deconstructive mood of so much recent revisionary work on English romanticism. Although De Quincey’s title evokes the autobiographical Confessions of St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he was at pains to declare that the subject of his book was impersonal, “preternatural,” pharmaceutical, rather than autobiographical, natural, or spiritual. “In the Confessions De Quincey rewrites the Biographia in a pathological rather than a normative moral/aesthetic register, showing Genius, Imagination, Will and Principle to be conditioned by the complex nervous organisation of civilisation and all its discontents. The chapter suggests that the dreams represent a De Quinceyan inflection or involution, of Coleridgean imagination.
