Introduction 1 Knowledge and Power
Notes Introduction 1. Robert Maniquis, Lonely Empires: Personal and Public Visions of Thomas De Quincey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); Josephine McDonagh, De Quincey’s Disciplines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 42–65. 1 Knowledge and Power 1. Sigmund K. Proctor, Thomas De Quincey’s Theory of Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1943), pp. 107–22; John E. Jordan, Thomas De Quincey, Literary Critic: His Method and Achievement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952), pp. 38–42. 2. William Hazlitt, “The Indian Jugglers” (Table-Talk, 1821; originally in The Examiner, Feb. 7, 1819), equates the distinction between “power” and “knowledge” with that which exists between “intellectual” and “mechan- ical excellence”; The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols., ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. W. Dent & Sons, 1930–4), VIII: 77–89, esp. 83–6. 3. De Quincey did not write a “theory of theory itself.” He did, however, raise the question “What is Theory” (manuscript, Royal Institution of Cornwall MS ENYS 396). This fragment, written 1823 or early 1824, was a response to Kant’s essay, “Über den Gemeinspruch: das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis” (1793; On the Common Expression: that may be true in Theory, but it is useless in Practice); it anticipates De Quincey’s examination of Ricardo’s “theory of value” in the “Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy” (London Magazine IX, March, April, May, 1824). As in the opening to “Suspiria de Profundis,” De Quincey attempts to redress the overwhelm- ing social preoccupation with material and practical concerns by defend- ing the necessity of subjective deliberations.
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