Charles Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. ISBN 0-87023-961-9 (hardback); 0-87023-962-7 (paperback). Price: US$55 (£49.95); US$19.95 (£17.95).

De Quincey often admitted that his long and arduous writing career was driven by the pressing need for money. But for "dire necessity," he once declared, "I should never have written a line for the press" (quoted by Rzepka, 3). Yet his lengthy and involuted autobiographical narratives usually leave us with the sense of a Romantic visionary whose opulent writings contrast starkly with his impecunious circumstances as a hack writer for the reviews and newspapers of the day. Biographical traditions, following the ideological directives of De Quincey's self representation, have focused on the transcendental De Quincey who miraculously overcame his circumstances to produce the huge corpus of writing that is currently being collected in the twenty-one volumes of his Works emerging from Pickering and Chatto. Yet De Quincey himself was often subversive of the transcendentalist claims and philosophies of contemporaries such as Kant and Coleridge and his autobiographical writings are also deeply materialistic documents with plenty of detail about his economic life, his inheritance and expectations, his debts and gifts, his addictions and deprivations, his lending and borrowing habits and the like in terms of financial detail. Drawing largely upon new historicist and ideological critiques of Romanticism as well as gift-economy theory, Rzepka's book sets out to invert the traditional perspective on De Quincey and to show how his apparently other-worldly existence was in fact predicated on the complex dynamics of economic exchange which constituted the world of nineteenth-century literary production. In his Suspiria de Profundis De Quincey famously compared the human brain to a palimpsest, and his own writings, richly layered with recurrent motifs and tropes, have been similarly constructed in the critical tradition as being inherently and profoundly unified. Rzepka follows this familiar route of reading De Quincey's oeuvre as interlinked and largely coherent, positing the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater as the textual nexus for the opium-eater's lifelong cogitation on "the connections between literary power and the Sublime, between the Sublime and sublimation, between sublimation and gift-giving, between gift-giving and sacrament, between sacrament and sacrifice" (x). This list of topics and associations provides some indication of the sweeping scope of Rzepka's book, ranging through De Quincey's multi-layered texts in the pursuit of his argument. At the heart of Rzepka's argument is his working out of the relationship between De Quincey's theoretical notion of literary "power" and his desire to achieve freedom from material dependency. Opium and literature are both interconnected as means to this end: both act as agents towards the subjugation of historical and material consciousness. The Marxist equation between religion and opium is thus extended to include literature as another means of ideological control: a familiar enough concept in recent literary theory but one that finds particular resonance in the opium-infused life and writings of De Quincey. Thus baldly stated, Rzepka's argument may seem unsurprising: yet another version of new historicism's engagement with Romanticism given a particularly economic emphasis. It is the textual detail with which Rzepka works this out, and his ability to re-read the well-known texts as well as recover some lesser-known ones that makes his work so rewarding. De Quincey's political economy, literary theory, Roman history, literary reminiscences and autobiography all come together?though the result is not some transcendent literary achievement as before but a much more qualified one, underwritten by material interests and anxieties. A vital thread holding the argument together is the language of Christological sacrifice and gift employed metaphorically by De Quincey which Rzepka returns to time and again. The Confessions itself, it has often been noticed, secularizes a generic tradition initiated by St. Augustine. Rzepka follows through the …