Description: Original Ambivalence explores a powerful psychic and existential dilemma running through the works upon which the reputation of Thomas De Quincey (1785-1869) as a prose artist has always rested: the dream-centered, visionary autobiographies that began in 1821 with The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and concluded in 1849 with The English Mail-Coach. Employing the theories of and insights afforded by René Girard's «fundamental anthropology, » the study demonstrates how De Quincey's best known works both invoke and react against the Romantic assumptions of universality, originality, and authenticity which are their basis.
Review Quotes: «Tracing the interconnections of ritual, myth, and sacrifice manifest throughout De Quincey's introspective reveries and his social and political journalism, Schneider focuses upon De Quincey as instrument and agent in a larger and more complex mythic construct. For its effective analysis of Thomas De Quincey's works in the context of the human sciences, as well for the broader implications of the paradoxical interactions of myth and violence, Matthew Schneider's book is a major contribution to the study of one of the most provocative prose-writers of the Romantic era.» (Frederick Burwick, University of California at Los Angeles øUCLA!)
«This is a provocative study, informed by a sophisticated anthropological understanding, of the second-generation English romantic whose 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' inspired Baudelaire's 'Paradis artificiels'. Schneider rightly focuses on violence that makes Thomas De Quincey a major figure in the breakdown of classical mimesis and the emergence of modernism. De Quincey's world is no longer the romantic utopia of the imaginary; as Schneider persuasively shows, the writer's fascination with murder, speed, and drugs are means of returning to an originary violence that he hopes thereby to control, but in which he inevitaby loses himself.» (Eric Gans, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of French, UCLA)