Faithful infidelity: De Quincey's implicit publication of Kant's thought in England

This dissertation discovers previously hidden allusive moments---or "involutes"---in Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar (1821) that concern his attempt to "publish," or popularize, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Each of the involutes brought forward in this study is traced back to specific passages throughout the gamut of Kant's writings from Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) to "Perpetual Peace" (1795) and especially "The Architectonic of Pure Reason" from the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787). These passages not only reveal the extent and depth of De Quincey's knowledge of Kant's philosophy, but also provoke an analysis of the underlying motives behind these moments of Kant's "implicit publication," involution, or arrested development in the fabric of De Quincey's text. These textual vestiges of Kant represent, then, more than just haphazard fodder for an aggregate of occasional ruminations. Together with laudanum they provide an organizing principle for De Quincey's persistent interest in self-development and on the perturbing factors that arise in attempts to apply the moral law. The particular focus in this dissertation is on instances that take place within the peculiar experiential context of opium-eating, dreaming, and reflecting upon the implications of Kant's philosophy in the archetypical English setting of Dove Cottage.