Full Description
This collection of essays examines the way psychoactive substances are described and discussed within late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literary and cultural texts. Covering several genres, such as novels, poetry, autobiography and non-fiction, individual essays provide insights on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of drug effects of opium, alcohol and many other plant-based substances. Contributors consider both contemporary and recent medical knowledge in order to contextualise and illuminate understandings of how drugs were utilised as stimulants, as relaxants, for pleasure, as pain relievers and for other purposes. Chapters also examine the novelty of experimentations of drugs in conversation with the way literary texts incorporate them, highlighting the importance of literary and cultural texts for addressing ethical questions.
Contents
1. Situating Psychopharmacology in Literature and Culture, Natalie Roxburgh, Jennifer S. Henke.- 2. Historicising Keats' Opium Imagery through Neoclassical Medical and Literary Discourses, Octavia Cox.- 3. "Grief's comforter, Joy's guardian, good King Poppy!": Opium and Victorian Poetry, Irmtraud Huber.- 4. Dangerous Literary Substances: Discourses of Drugs and Dependence in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel Debates, Sarah Frühwirth.- 5. Blurring Plant and Human Boundaries: Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants, C. A. Vaughn Cross.- 6. Pharmacokinetics and Opium-Eating: Metabolites, Stomach Aches and the Afterlife of De Quincey's Addiction, Hannah Markley.- 7. A Posthumanist Approach to Agency in De Quincey's Confessions, Anna Rowntree.- 8. Reading De Quinceyan Rhetoric Against the Grain: An Actor-Network-Theory Approach, Anuj Gupta.- 9. Blood Streams, Cash Flows and Circulations of Desire: Psychopharmacological Knowledge About Opium in Nineteenth-Century Women's Fiction, Nadine Böhm-Schnitker.- 10. The Indeterminate Pharmacology of Absinthe in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Beyond, Vanessa Herrmann.- 11. "She furnishes the fan and the lavender water": Nervous Distress, Female Healers and Jane Austen's Herbal Medicine, Rebecca Spear.- 12. "When poor mama long restless lies, / She drinks the poppy's juice": Opium and Gender in British Romantic Literature, Joseph Crawford.- 13. Middlemarch and Medical Practice in the Regency Era: From "Bottles of Stuff" to the Clinical Gaze, Björn Bosserhoff.
