What is it about?
In addition to elements of phantasmagorical prose-poem, medical treatise and candid autobiography, De Quincey’s hybrid text, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, less obviously utilizes the diverse genres of the familiar essay and travel writing. A tension between these genres, predisposed respectively to the domestic and the foreign, brings about an implosive, pre-colonial mode and historical moment of Orientalism. More specifically, this moment involves the opium-eater’s hedging, tentative identity, as an “essayistic” amalgam of ludic periodical writer, pseudo philosopher and effete, armchair traveller, and his congruently unwitting, casual usage of the racially-loaded word “amok”. This is a word of Malay derivation, which is used to (in)appropriately describe the Malay figure’s rampaging, fearful presence amid the Asian geography of the opium-eater’s dreams.
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Why is it important?
This essay interrogates the pan-Asian Orientalism of De Quincey's text, to identify a specifically Malayan historical context, which has previously gone unnoticed.
Perspectives
It establishes a new context in which to read the Romantic familiar essay, as a kind of domestic antidote to the burgeoning literature of intrepid travel in the early nineteenth century.
Dr Simon Peter Hull
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Domestic Extremism and De Quincey's "A-muck" Malay, Essays in Romanticism, January 2014, Liverpool University Press,
DOI: 10.3828/eir.2014.21.1.3.
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