Psychopharmacology in British Literature and Culture, 1780–1900 (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)

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--back cover Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv Situating Psychopharmacology in Literature and Culture (Natalie Roxburgh, Jennifer S. Henke)....Pages 1-19 Front Matter ....Pages 21-21 Historicising Keats’ Opium Imagery Through Neoclassical Medical and Literary Discourses (Octavia Cox)....Pages 23-46 “Grief’s Comforter, Joy’s Guardian, Good King Poppy!”: Opium and Victorian Poetry (Irmtraud Huber)....Pages 47-67 Dangerous Literary Substances: Discourses of Drugs and Dependence in the Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel Debates (Sarah Frühwirth)....Pages 69-89 Front Matter ....Pages 91-91 Blurring Plant and Human Boundaries: Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants (C. A. Vaughn Cross)....Pages 93-115 Pharmacokinetics and Opium-Eating: Metabolites, Stomach Aches and the Afterlife of De Quincey’s Addiction (Hannah Markley)....Pages 117-133 A Posthumanist Approach to Agency in De Quincey’s Confessions (Anna Rowntree)....Pages 135-151 Front Matter ....Pages 153-153 Reading De Quinceyan Rhetoric Against the Grain: An Actor-Network-Theory Approach (Anuj Gupta)....Pages 155-170 Blood Streams, Cash Flows and Circulations of Desire: Psychopharmacological Knowledge About Opium in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Fiction (Nadine Böhm-Schnitker)....Pages 171-194 The Indeterminate Pharmacology of Absinthe in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Beyond (Vanessa Herrmann)....Pages 195-213 Front Matter ....Pages 215-215 “She Furnishes the Fan and the Lavender Water”: Nervous Distress, Female Healers and Jane Austen’s Herbal Medicine (Rebecca Spear)....Pages 217-240 “When Poor Mama Long Restless Lies, / She Drinks the Poppy’s Juice”: Opium and Gender in British Romantic Literature (Joseph Crawford)....Pages 241-261 Middlemarch and Medical Practice in the Regency Era: From “Bottles of Stuff” to the Clinical Gaze (Björn Bosserhoff)....Pages 263-285 Back Matter ....Pages 287-302