Overview
""Twelve-step"" recovery programmes for a variety of addictive behaviours have become popular. According to John W. Crowley, the origin of these movements - including Alcoholics Anonymous - lies in the Washingtonian Temperance Society, founded in Baltimore in the 1840s. In lectures, pamphlets and books (most notably John B. Gough's ""Autobiography"", published in 1845), recovering ""drunkards"" described their enslavement to and liberation from alcohol. Though widely circulated in their time, these influential temperance narratives seem to have been largely forgotten. This is a presentation of a collection of revealing excerpts from temperance texts, along with Crowley's own introductions. The tales, including ""The Experience Meeting"" from T.S. Arthur's ""Six Nights with the Washingtonians"" (1842) and the autobiographical ""Narrative of Charles Woodman, A Reformed Inebriate"" (1843), still speak with surprising force to the miseries of drunkenness and the joys of deliverance.
Full Product Details
Author: John W. Crowley (Director, Humanities Doctoral Program, Syracuse University)
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint: Johns Hopkins University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 1.30cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.340kg
ISBN: 9780801860072
ISBN 10: 0801860075
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 31 May 1999
Recommended Age: From 17
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
<p>Crowley's editing is discreet and his introductions to the individual selections provide brief yet instructive contextual backgrounds... He has done a valuable service in 'recovering' these narrative of despair and hope and placing them at the disposal of a wide range of possible readers and researchers.--Ian Baird Canadian Bulletin of Medical History (01/01/2003)
<p> Crowley's editing is discreet and his introductions to the individual selections provide brief yet instructive contextual backgrounds... He has done a valuable service in 'recovering' these narrative of despair and hope and placing them at the disposal of a wide range of possible readers and researchers. -- Ian Baird, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History
Author Information
John W. Crowley is a professor of English and director of the Humanities Doctoral Program at Syracuse University, where he has taught since 1970. Best known as a scholar of William Dean Howells, he has written other works on alcohol-related topics, including the widely praised The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction.
