Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey

featuring Marc Cohen, Teaching Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

The first literary addiction memoir

Forging a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater seamlessly weaves the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory, and imagination….it paved the way for later generations of literary drug users, from Baudelaire to Burroughs, and anticipated psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious. —Penguin Random House

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater remains its author’s most famous and frequently-read work and one of the period’s central statements about both the power and terror of imagination. A notorious success since its 1821 publication, the work has been an important influence on philosophers, theorists, and psychologists, as well as literary writers, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. —Broadview Press

What Wordsworth is to the world of perception, De Quincey is to the dream world, giving us concrete structures in place of mental static, structures impossible to describe except in the sentences he built to accommodate their labyrinthine organization. His imagination thrived on poison. But his sentences transmute all that pain into beauty. —The New Yorker

Meeting Dates: Tuesdays, February 23 and March 2

Cost: $35, includes a copy of the book shipped to your home

Register online or call 919.962.1544