Thesis (Ph. D.)--Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität, Strassburg. / "List of De Quincey's contributions on German literature": p.[120]-123.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität, Strassburg. / "List of De Quincey's contributions on German literature": p.[120]-123.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Leipzig, 1902. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [81]-85).

The thesis examines Thomas De Quincey’s opium use as a product of social strain. De Quincey’s collection of work provides evidence that he felt alienated from society prior to his addiction and that his feelings of inadequacy contributed to his dependence on drugs. Utilizing Robert K. Merton’s strain theory, this thesis delineates De Quincey’s aspirational references and perceived failures through an examination of his imagery and interprets his perceptions of human life as a catalyst for his compulsions to cope with opium. De Quincey, strained by the aspirations of an industrial and imperialistic society, looked for several avenues of escape. The Romanticism of William Wordsworth presented De Quincey with a method for alleviating social strain; however, when De Quincey failed to discover the transcendence evident in Lyrical Ballads he turned to the intoxicating effects of opium and retreated from English society.

In this thesis, I have analysed representations of a selection of fictional and factual serial killers from Thomas de Quincey to Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the autobiographical narratives of real life serial killers Carl Panzram, Donald Gaskins and Ian Brady. My analysis of these texts identifies the portrayals of serial killers in terms of representations as aesthetic, existential, socially othered phenomena. The thesis proceeds from the premise that serial killer narratives often obscure the existential brute reality of murder. As such, I examine serial killing vis-à-vis attempted explanatory shifts in such narratives which represent serial murder and serial killers in terms of aesthetic, psychopathological, moral/religious/supernatural and socio-political phenomena, and I investigate the implications of these shifts. I focus initially on Romantic ideas of the self, and in the relationship between the ‘outsider’ artist/poet and the textual emergence of the figure of the solitary ‘serial’ murderer in the early nineteenth century, particularly in relation to De Quincey’s aesthetic murder essays. Subsequent fluctuations of the representation of serial killing between mental-health, law-and-order and political/social discourses are discussed in relation to the subsequent texts. I conclude by examining cognitive dissonance theory, A.E. Van Vogt’s description of the Violent Man, and James Gilligan’s theories on violence, in order to propose a possible synergetic response to narratives and representations of serial killers and serial killing.

Literature and medicine are not usually seen as related disciplines, but scholars have already begun producing fruitful scholarship regarding historical and aesthetic interactions between them. This thesis adds to that scholarship by examining medicine and literature in nineteenth-century Britain. More specifically, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both use nineteenth-century medical case conventions to tell their stories. Furthermore, because both works deal with addiction, divided selves, and the power that physical substances can have on morality and character, these two works provide an excellent comparison coming 65 years apart. As such, they are a great point from which to begin looking more closely at how the interactions between medicine and literature evolved during the nineteenth-century in Britain. This thesis examines the role that "scientific" discourse has played in medicine and literature as interpretive disciplines, the rhetorical techniques and innovations surrounding the intersection of the two disciplines, and the authority that each discipline derived by implicitly borrowing ideological assumptions and textual forms from the other. Confessions is a wonderful example of a Romantic, autobiographical text that clearly uses the medical case study conventions; in fact, De Quincey was often cited in the years following the publication of Confessions as an authority on opium and its uses. By the time Jekyll and Hyde was published, however, a work like Confessions could no longer hold its own in medical debates. The professional institutions of medicine and literature had changed too much. Hence, by analyzing these two works side-by-side, I intend to illustrate different narrative approaches to similar issues at the beginning and end of the century. More importantly, I hope to use these texts in conjunction with specific medical case histories to discuss each text's reliance on interdisciplinary authority.