Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature

by Adam Colman

Overview

This book explores the rise of the aesthetic category of addiction in the nineteenth century, a century that saw the development of an established medical sense of drug addiction. Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature focuses especially on formal invention—on the uses of literary patterns for intensified, exploratory engagement with unattained possibility—resulting from literary intersections with addiction discourse. Early chapters consider how Romantics such as Thomas De Quincey created, with regard to drug habit, an idea of habitual craving that related to self-experimenting science and literary exploration; later chapters look at Victorians who drew from similar understandings while devising narratives of repetitive investigation. The authors considered include De Quincey, Percy Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Marie Corelli.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030015893
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	01/09/2019
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Edition description:	1st ed. 2019
Pages:	209
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Adam Colman is a Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 2. Shelley, Alcohol, and the "world we make": Habit's Patterns in The Cenci.- 3. The Labyrinths of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.- 3. From Lotos-Eaters to Lotus-Eaters: Tennyson's and Rossetti's Mediated Addiction.- 5. Bleak House's Addictive Detective-Work.- 6. Optative Movement and Drink in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.- 7. Epilogue: Generic Variety in Marie Corelli's Wormwood and Beyond.