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Revolution and Romanticism
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A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 118 3 174 x 110 mm 326 pages |
THOMAS DE QUINCEY Klosterheim: or, the Masque 1832 Written halfway between Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) and the great, but fragmentary, Suspiria de Profundis of the 1840s, Klosterheim is ostensibly a gothic fantasy in the manner of Ann Radcliffe, set in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War. But De Quincey is writing at a period of desperate need and continuing addiction, and his gothic has a particular function, unlocking a door into the opium-taker’s world of illusion and dream. £30 $55 I have read nothing since Quentin Durward which would compare in interest with Klosterheim; and in purity of style and idiom, in which the scholar is ever implied, and the scholarly never obtrudes itself, it reaches an excellence to which Sir W. Scott... appears never to have aspired, rather than to have fallen short of. |
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