Drawing on a broad range of rarely studied sources, De Quincey's Disciplines reveals the English Opium-Eater to be a more complex and contradictory figure than the latter-day Romantic and psychedelic dreamer usually portrayed. Taking a theoretical, new historicist stance, Josephine McDonagh's innovative examination of De Quincey's less frequently scrutinized works recontextualizes De Quincey as a true interdisciplinarian, aspiring to participation in the major intellectual project of his time: the formation of new fields of knowledge, and the attempt to unify these into an organic whole.