Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature

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 inventionon the uses of literary patterns for intensified, exploratory engagement with unattained possibilityresulting 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.

Contends that certain 19th century writers writers helped generate an aesthetic category of addiction that maintained elements of scientific investigation Examines a broad range of writers, including including Percy Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson Engages growing critical discussion about the interrelationship between aesthetics, science, and medicine in Romantic and Victorian literature

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

Contenu

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.