Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Natalie Roxburgh ,  Jennifer S. Henke
Publisher:   Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Imprint:   Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Edition:   1st ed. 2020
Weight:   0.539kg
ISBN:  

9783030535971

ISBN 10:   3030535975
Pages:   302
Publication Date:   30 September 2020
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

1. Situating Psychopharmacology in Literature and Culture Natalie Roxburgh, Jennifer S. Henke   I. Drugs and Genre   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   II. Rethinking the Pharmacological Body: Drugs and the Borders of the Human                                   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   III. The Cultural Politics of Known Drug Effects                                                     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             IV. Historicizing the Prescription: Medication and Self-Medication   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 

Reviews

The readership of this book will be as vast as the interests in drug history. ... these are highly enjoyable essays, which, interestingly enough, provoke some sense of inebriation comparable to the object of their study. ... a work to be enjoyed piece by piece, as a mental delight. (Alain Touwaide, Doody's Book Reviews, March 5, 2021)

"""The readership of this book will be as vast as the interests in drug history. ... these are highly enjoyable essays, which, interestingly enough, provoke some sense of inebriation comparable to the object of their study. ... a work to be enjoyed piece by piece, as a mental delight."" (Alain Touwaide, Doody's Book Reviews, March 5, 2021)"

""The readership of this book will be as vast as the interests in drug history. ... these are highly enjoyable essays, which, interestingly enough, provoke some sense of inebriation comparable to the object of their study. ... a work to be enjoyed piece by piece, as a mental delight."" (Alain Touwaide, Doody's Book Reviews, March 5, 2021)

Author Information

Natalie Roxburgh is Lecturer and Research Fellow in English Literary Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. She has published widely on a variety of topics—such as science, economics and politics—from the seventeenth century to the present, including a monograph titled Representing Public Credit: Credible Commitment, Fiction, and the Rise of the Financial Subject (2016). Jennifer S. Henke is Assistant Professor at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her publications include topics ranging from Shakespeare in film to science and posthumanism. She is the author of the monograph Unsex Me Here (2014), and her second book deals with medicine and the pregnant female body in eighteenth-century literature and culture. 

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