1st Edition
Thomas De Quincey in the Context of Late-Romantic Intellectuals
Introduction
De Quincey’s “Opium-Eater” Image: Two Major Interpretive Routes
Lacunae of the Opium-Centred Approach
Research Questions and Analytical Procedure
Chapter 1 Context of Late-Romantic Intellectuals: Towards a Definition
Etymological History of the Noun Intellectual
Coleridge and the Ideal Late-Romantic Intellectual
Print Culture and the Conservative Shadow
Late-Romantic Intellectuals and Middle-Class Readership
Chapter 2 De Quincey’s Creation of the Opium-Scholar Persona by Scientific Scholarship
Confessions as a Medical Treatise
From Medicine to Polymath: De Quincey’s Scholarly Reinforcement
Janus-Faced Late-Romantic Gentlemen-Scholars of Science
Chapter 3 The Cultural Shadow of the Opium-Scholar under Magazine Sensationalism
Beyond Hallucination: High Culture in De Quincey’s Opium Writing
Self-Reflexive Irony in De Quincey’s Aesthetics of Murder
Classical Cultivation and Cultural Hierarchy
Chapter 4 The Opium-Scholar as an Intellectual in National Progress Crises
Agoraphobic Technological Progress in “System of the Heavens”
De Quincey’s Logic of Dichotomous Stability
Coleridgean Conservatism in “The English Mail-Coach”
Conclusion
Biography
Yingjie Duan is an assistant professor in English at the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University, China. He received his PhD in English Language and Literature at Beihang University, China, and was a visiting PhD student at the School of English, the University of Leeds (2022-2023). His major academic interest is English Romantic literature, particularly works of Thomas De Quincey. His latest publications include “De Quincey’s Self-fashioning into a Janus-faced Scholar in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” (2026) in Orbis Litterarum, “Revisiting Thomas De Quincey’s Aesthetics of Murder: Irony and Sensation in the Periodical Press” (2024) in English: Journal of the English Association, and “On the Cyclical Movement in John Keats’s ‘To Autumn’” (2021) in The Explicator.
