Main description:

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.

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 Fruhwirth

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 Boehm-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

Bjoern Bosserhoff