Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Download or read book Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature written by Adam Colman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.