Keeping Romanticism English: Thomas de Quincey Meets Allan Cunningham‪.‬

This article closely examines Thomas De Quincey's account of his meeting with the Scottish poet and essayist Allan Cunningham. Read in light of recent critical attention to De Quincey's role as a popularizer and disseminator of canonical Romantic literature and aesthetics, his treatment of the meeting with Cunningham and of other experiences in Scotland engages his larger project of constructing and transmitting a specifically English Romantic canon around the figure of Wordsworth. However, careful attention to the rhetoric in this brief text reveals both the fragility of such a construction of English Romanticism and the hybridity of De Quincey's literary identity. **********