Thomas de Quincey and the organisation of knowledge, 1820-1859

McDonagh, Josephine (1989) Thomas de Quincey and the organisation of knowledge, 1820-1859. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

The unconventional nature of De Quincey's works, fragmentary and digressive, often factual in content, and always polemical, cause their marginalisation in mainstream literary criticism. But critical responses to his work repeat the terms of his own literary theory, which requires evidence of organic wholeness in a work of art that will transcend the material world. De Quincey's work is in fact central to the development of a dominant notion of literature, and is responsible for his own marginalisation. De Quincy requires that literature should be uncontaminated by the concerns of the material world. In order to sustain this he draws upon ideas outside the realm of the aesthetic, relying on the contamination he hopes to transcend. The first half of the thesis traces the economy of disciplines that is established. De Quincy wrote at a time of the rapid expansion of knowledge, and was actively engaged in delineating new disciplines. By focussing on the idea of literature, political economy, and language, I show the way in which these different fields are not self-contained, but reliant on shared areas of interest. This contamination within the fields of knowledge is important since De Quincey connects epistemological and social order. The second half of the thesis focusses on the relationship established between the orders of discourse and those of society. The figure of the palimpsest provides the means for the incorporation of different disciplines, and also that of various individuals into one society. This is only available through violence. The violence is inscribed in an aesthetic which enforces hierarchised relations of power by demanding submission to the authority of the text. A reading of the autobiographies in relation to his essays on the Opium Wars shows the way in which aesthetic concerns slide into the political and provide justification for the coercive practices that maintain exploitative relations in society.

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