A club of “murder-fanciers”
Thomas De Quincey’s essays “On Murder” and consuming violence in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12154709 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sarah Sharp (0000-0002-3533-5957, University of Aberdeen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 445-462 |
| Publication date | 2023-10-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Nineteenth Century Contexts (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0890-5495 • E-ISSN: 1477-2663 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/08905495.2023.2273081 |
| OpenAlex | W4388193618 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.De Quincey's ironically inflected essay on violence and aesthetics was to influence representations of crime in literature for the next century.Presented as a leaked monthly lecture from a meeting of the "The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder" and submitted by scandalised contributor "X.Y.Z," the essay gives a history of the "art" of murder.De Quincey's chosen venue for his "modest proposal on the aesthetics of murder" could not have been better selected (Burwick 1996, 83).As Mark Schoenfield (2013) has argued, De Quincey's first essay "On Murder" engages with and reflects a period of sustained preoccupation with violence and criminality within the influential periodical Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.De Quincey's essay, with its mixing of high and low cultural registers, also reflected the complex negotiation of readership identity which accompanied the birth of a new generation of periodicals in the first decades of the nineteenth century.Blackwood's (first published 1817), its older Whig rival The Edinburgh Review (1802), and their peers of the 1810s, 20s and 30s, emerged at a key moment in the development of the magazine form.The expansion of the British reading public and the increasing affordability of print media offered opportunities and challenges for enterprising periodical publishers as they attempted to achieve wide readerships whilst maintaining an air of cultural exclusivity.Michael Allen notes, All the major publishing ventures of the early nineteenth-century aimed at uniting the popularity which would attract readers of the first type (the "many") with the prestige and "quality" which would retain the more influential readers of the second kind (the "few")
Art · Club · Criminology · Homicide · Injury prevention · Medical emergency · Poison control · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Engineering · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Medicine · Psychology
The making of English reading audiences, 1790-1832
Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
Paper Pellets
British Periodicals and Romantic Identity
The Hanging Tree
Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine
Inventing the Gothic Corpse
Domestic Murder in Nineteenth-Century England
Poe and the British Magazine Tradition
De Quincey's Romanticism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |