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Romantic Opium in a Global Context Romantic Opium in a Global Context
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Opium in a British Romantic Context Opium in a British Romantic Context
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Addiction and the Romantic Imagination Addiction and the Romantic Imagination
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Notes Notes
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Further Reading Further Reading
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40 Opium
Get accessPeter J. Kitson is Professor of Romantic Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange, 1760–1840 (2013), Romantic Literature, Race and Colonial Encounter (2007), and (with D. Lee and T. Fulford) Romantic Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (2004). He is the editor (with D. Lee) of the eight-volume edition of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings from the British Romantic Period (1999) and (with T. Fulford) Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion 1770–1835 (2001–2002). He is currently completing his monograph, Opium and the Global Romantic Imagination: War, Trade, and Commerce.
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Published:22 May 2024
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Abstract
This chapter reappraises the close association between opium use and the writers and artists of the Romantic period. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey famously consumed the drug in its various forms and wrote about it as did other nineteenth-century figures. Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Christabel’, and ‘The Pains of Sleep’ (1816), and De Quincey’s ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (1821) established the association between opium use, Romantic creativity, and the vexed question of addiction. This chapter describes the wider cultural impact of the growing use of opium, usually in the form of laudanum, both as a medicine and as a recreational and artistic stimulant, as well as setting its domestic British use in the global context of the triangular opium and tea trades between Britain, India, and China, leading up to the First Opium War of 1839–1842.
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