The Haunting of Thomas De Quincey

This article explores the role of ghosts and hauntings within De Quincey's autobiographical writings, considering the ways in which he employed the language of haunting in order to articulate his experience of the recurring dreams, memories, and opium hallucinations that pursued him throughout his life. Considering De Quincey's life-long fascination with ghosts and Gothic effects, it considers not just his rhetorical deployment of ghosts and hauntings as tropes or metaphors, but also the ways in which exorcism and necromancy come to function, in De Quincey's writings, as models for the work of memory and autobiography itself.