HASE Lecture by British Academy Global Professor Robert Morrison (Bath Spa University) – 28/5/2024, 6-7:30pm
The Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE) warmly invites you its next of the 2024 Guest Lectures. Our speaker is British Academy Global Professor Robert Morrison (Bath Spa University) and the title of his talk is "The Letters of Thomas De Quincey: 'Ghosts of the Past in some glimpses'". Abstract and bio are available below.
The talk is scheduled for Tuesday, 28th of May, 6-7:30pm (EEST), and will be delivered on Teams. Here is the link:
We very much look forward to Professor Morrison’s talk and we hope to see many of you there.
For questions or more information, please get in touch with the HASE Secretary, Dr Angelos Evangelou (aevang@enl.uoa.gr).
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Abstract
I am editing the letters of the nineteenth-century English essayist and opium addict Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), which is widely considered the first modern drug memoir. When I began the project, I knew of roughly 800 extant De Quincey letters, but in the past 4 years I have located an additional 250 De Quincey letters, many of them apparently unread in well over a century. This presentation will explore the challenges and rewards of producing a scholarly edition entirely from manuscript material. Above all perhaps, when completed the edition will offer an alternative narrative to the highly romanticized account of drug use and abuse promulgated by De Quincey in his Confessions. ‘In modern society the main cause of drug addiction…is a literary tradition of romantic claptrap, started by Coleridge and De Quincey, and continued without serious interruption ever since’, declares Theodore Dalrymple in his Romancing Opiates (2006). My edition of De Quincey’s letters—forthcoming in two volumes from Oxford University Press—will tell a grittier, sadder, more compelling story.
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Bio
Robert Morrison is British Academy Global Professor at Bath Spa University. He is the author of The Regency Revolution (2019), which was shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Crown Award for the best in nonfiction historical writing, and which was named by The Economist as one of its 2019 Books of the Year. His biography of Thomas De Quincey, The English Opium Eater (2009), was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize. Morrison edited De Quincey’s Selected Writings (2019) for Oxford University Press and Jane Austen’s Persuasion (2011) for Harvard University Press.