Inventing the addict
Subtitle: drugs, race, and sexuality in nineteenth-century British and American literature
By: Susan Zieger.
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Amherst
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9781558496804; 9781558496798
Subjects: American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Addicts in literature; Drug abuse in literature; Alcoholism in literature; Addicts -- History; Drug abuse -- History
Description: The notion of addiction has always conjured first-person stories, often beginning with an insidious seduction, followed by compulsion and despair, culminating in recovery and tentative hope for the future. We are all familiar with this form of individual life narrative, Susan Zieger observes, but we know far less about its history. "Addict" was not an available identity until the end of the nineteenth century, when a modernizing medical establishment and burgeoning culture of consumption updated the figure of the sinful drunkard popularized by the temperance movement. In Inventing the Addict, Zieger tells the story of how the addict, a person uniquely torn between disease and desire, emerged from a variety of earlier figures such as drunkards, opium-eating scholars, vicious slave masters, dissipated New Women, and queer doctors. Drawing on a broad range of literary and cultural material, including canonical novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula, she traces the evolution of the concept of addiction through a series of recurrent metaphors: exile, self-enslavement, disease, and vampirism. She shows how addiction took on multiple meanings beyond its common association with intoxication or specific habit-forming substances - it was an abiding desire akin to both sexual attraction and commodity fetishism, a disease that strangely failed to meet the requirements of pathology, and the citizen's ironic refusal to fulfill the promise of freedom. Nor was addiction an ideologically neutral idea. As Zieger demonstrates, it took form over time through specific, shifting intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality, reflecting the role of social power in the construction of meaning. -- from back cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Part I. Travel, exile, and self-enslavement: Pioneers of inner space: drug autobiography and manifest destiny; "Mankind has been drunk": race and addiction in Uncle Tom's cabin; Impostors of freedom: hypodermic morphine and the labors of passing in E. P. Roe's Without a home; title: Part II. Disease, desire, and defect: Needling desires: women, morphinomania, and self-representation in fin-de-siecle Britain; "Afflictions a la Oscar Wilde": the strange case of addiction and sexuality in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Un-death and bare life: addiction and eugenics in Dracula and The blood of the vampire.