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3.0 

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings

By Thomas De Quincey
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings by Thomas De Quincey digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Thomas De Quincey, an English essayist during the turn of the nineteenth century, began life as a fairly sickly child, and would spend much of his life in the grips of one illness or another. Through a series of misguided attempts at getting an education, De Quincey dropped out of college and instead became a vagrant. The youth barely had enough food to eat and resorted to begging in order to survive. These years served as a depressing foundation for his later years, which were marred by isolation and solitude. After eventually returning to and graduating from university, De Quincey became a journalist and translator. His works gained little popularity. De Quiney's resulting depression crippled him, and the forlorn man turned to opium in order to escape from reality. The use quickly turned to abuse, though, which was the subject of De Quincey's most famous work "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater." The piece made him an overnight sensation as it detailed his personal background and spiraling drug abuse. De Quincey revised and republished the piece a number of times in order to address questions and criticisms that the population had about his portrayal of the addiction. This essay, along with three other works, are included in the collection "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings."

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23 Reviews

3.0
“genuinely one of the best best things I've read for my degree this year. De Quincey writes the most exquisite, disgusting, fragile, intense prose, which feels to me like it's somewhere between James Joyce (esp. Portrait of the Artist, 1916) and the sermons of John Donne (esp. his final, 1631 sermon known as "Deaths Duell")!!! also this feels very proto-Freudian, and ahead of its time (1820s) – I believe De Quincey was actually the first person to coin the words 'pathological' and 'subconscious'. what at first seems to be about opium, or about guilt, actually turns out to be about human language and the self and trauma and life and death and infinity...and crocodiles! De Quincey is haunted by crocodiles. they keep coming up in his dreams, trying to give him 'cancerous kisses'...”

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