Inventing the Addict
Regular price
€33.99
19th-century substance use
A01=Susan Marjorie Zieger
addiction and commodity fetishism
addiction and desire
addiction and moral reform
addiction and personal identity
addiction and social power
addiction as disease and desire
addiction as exile
addiction as metaphorical disease
addiction as self-enslavement
addiction beyond substances
addiction in American culture
addiction in cultural studies
addiction in late 19th-century society
addiction in novels
Author_Susan Marjorie Zieger
canonical literature and addiction
Category=DSBF
Category=JBFN
citizen and freedom in addiction discourse
class and addiction narratives
cultural history of addiction
cultural narratives of compulsive behav
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde analysis
Dracula and cultural metaphors
early modern addiction figures
enslaved peoples and substance use
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
evolution of addict identity
evolution of intoxication narratives
first-person addiction stories
gender and addiction history
historical construction of addict identity
historical literary analysis of addiction
historical perspectives on habit
history of addiction
intoxication versus social meaning
literary metaphors for addiction
literary representations of addiction
medicalization of addiction
moral and social implications of addiction
moral panic and addiction
narrative of despair and recovery
New Women and addiction
opium consumption in literature
queer doctors in 19th-century medicine
race and substance use
sexuality and addiction
social construction of addiction
temperance movement influence
Uncle Tom's Cabin and addiction
vampirism as metaphor
Product details
- ISBN 9781558496804
- Weight: 442g
- Dimensions: 149 x 226mm
- Publication Date: 05 Nov 2008
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This book reconstructs the literary and cultural history of addiction from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. 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.
SUSAN ZIEGER is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside
