The ongoing critical fascination with Thomas De Quincey, and the burgeoning recognition of the centrality of his writings to the Romantic age and beyond, necessitates a critical examination.

The volume brings together ten of the top De Quincey scholars in the world, and engages directly with the immense amount of new information to be published on De Quincey in the past two decades. The book features wide-ranging and incisive assessments of De Quincey as essayist, addict, economist, subversive, biographer, autobiographer, aesthete, innovator, hedonist, and much else.