Overview
- 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
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (PLSM)
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About this book
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.
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Keywords
Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Adam Colman is a Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Authors: Adam Colman
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01590-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-01589-3Published: 21 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-01590-9Published: 08 January 2019
Series ISSN: 2634-6435
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 209
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, History of Britain and Ireland, British and Irish Literature