Volume 39, Number 4 · February 13, 1992
The Haunting of Thomas De Quincey
By Robert Bernard Martin
The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism
by John Barrell
Yale University Press, 235 pp., $30.00
Since the beginning of the Gulf War many Westerners must have asked themselves how much their attitudes toward Arab nations were based on actual events, how much on personal experience that we mistakenly treat as generic, how much on those institutionalized feelings about the alien and exotic that make up racism. The problem is not a new one, for the inability of West and East to distinguish between personal and social prejudices about each other has a long history: one wonders whether modern attitudes are all that different from what at least a few Europeans must have felt during the Crusades.
Review, 3314 words
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