This volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers students an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859). The edition presents De Quincey's work in all of its rich variety, and offers the most thorough and accurate annotation of De Quincey's major works ever compiled. Thomas De Quincey: 21st-Century Oxford Authors is the most comprehensive selection of De Quincey's writings published in decades, and includes all the essays that made him a major figure in his own age, and that give him a burgeoning relevance in ours. The volume features complete versions of his three most famous works of impassioned autobiography-Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), Suspiria de Profundis (1845), and 'The English Mail-Coach' (1849)-as well as a great deal of manuscript material related to these works, and an extensive selection from his revised version of the Confessions (1856). It contains all three of his essays 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' (1827, 1839, and 1854), the first two instalments of which are brilliant exercises in satirical high jinks, and the final instalment of which is a graphic account of the notorious Radcliffe Highway killings of 1811. It features lengthy excerpts from De Quincey's biographical recollections of 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge' (1834) and 'William Wordsworth' (1839), both of whom De Quincey admired intensely, though his personal relationship with both poets eventually collapsed into bitterness and self-justification. It features De Quincey's finest pieces of literary criticism, including 'On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth' (1823) and his two searching examinations of 'The Literature Knowledge and the Literature of Power' (1823 and (1848). The edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of De Quincey, and a Chronology, which enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works.

About the Author
Robert Morrison is British Academy Global Professor at Bath Spa University. He is the author of The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, which was a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize. His annotated edition of Jane Austen's Persuasion was published by Harvard University Press. For Oxford World's Classics, he edited De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, as well as his three essays On Murder. With Chris Baldick, he co-edited The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre and Tales of Terror from Blackwood`s Magazine in the same series.

Reviews
One of the themes that emerges in Robert Morrison's impressive edition of De Quincey's selected works, in Oxford University Press's '21st Century Oxford Authors' series, is the extent to which the author was awed by the sheer quantity of print, the mass of books and magazines, circulating among readers in Britain and abroad, on a scale never before known...Although these are not the themes that Robert Morrison chooses to highlight in this elegant and beautifully produced volume, they are nonetheless evident throughout the selection of works that he presents. With his surefooted editorial stance, Morrison leads us through a rich selection of De Quincey's greatest hits. * Josephine McDonagh, Romanticism *
Robert Morrison's new edition is a good place to start exploring De Quincey. * Jane Darcy, King's College London, Time Literary Supplement *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192868046
Author Robert Morrison
Format Paperback
Page Count 672
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 676g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 139mm * 25mm