Thomas De Quincey, Dark Interpreter

Thomas De Quincey’s multivalent engagement with Romantic translation

• Offers new perspectives on De Quincey’s most celebrated essays, his style and politics, and his famously fraught interactions with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Kant, and others
• Traces how De Quincey harnessed translation to reconfigure British Romanticism and open it towards European Romanticisms
• Combines insights from translation studies, critical theory, and Romantic studies in order to establish a novel method for reading Romantic writing

This book investigates how De Quincey’s writing was shaped by his work as a translator. Drawing on a wide range of materials and readings, it traces how De Quincey employed structures of interlinguistic and interdiscursive exchange to reimagine Romanticism. The book examines how his theories and practices of translation served to position his oeuvre, define his style, frame his philosophy and reinvent the meaning of literary creativity. Brecht de Groote traces in particular the ways in which De Quincey used translation to locate British Romanticism in its European context. In shedding new light on De Quincey, de Groote models a new translation-centric approach to the study of Romanticism.