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Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature

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  • © 2019

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

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

Keywords

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.


Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Adam Colman

About the author

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

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