Commerce, Genius and De Quincey’s Literary Identity

Stewart, David (2010) Commerce, Genius and De Quincey’s Literary Identity. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 50 (4). pp. 775-789. ISSN 0039-3657

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Abstract

In his magazine essays in the 1820s, Thomas De Quincey offers himself as a genius whose status is assured by his distance from the commercial market. Such cultural maneuvering is representative of a strain in Romanticism that has been stridently critiqued in New Historicist criticism in the last twenty-five years. The very insistence with which De Quincey made such claims tended to characterize him as a magazine “personality,” providing a legible, and hence saleable, commercial product. The effort was paradoxical from the first. By insisting on his separation from the print market, De Quincey integrated himself into it.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	Q300 English studies
Department:	Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Humanities
Depositing User:	Ellen Cole
Date Deposited:	09 May 2012 10:11
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2019 19:22
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6864

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