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The road of excess: A history of writers on drugs

From the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this far-reaching work. Drawing on history, science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography, Marcus Boon shows that the concept of drugs is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and reveals how different sets of connections between disciplines configure each drug's unique history. In chapters on opiates, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and psychedelics, Boon traces the history of the relationship between writers and specific drugs, and between these drugs and literary and philosophical traditions. With reference to the usual suspects from De Quincey to Freud to Irvine Welsh and with revelations about others such as Milton, Voltaire, Thoreau, and Sartre, The Road of Excess provides a novel and persuasive characterization of the "effects" of each class of drug--linking narcotic addiction to Gnostic spirituality, stimulant use to writing machines, anesthesia to transcendental philosophy, and psychedelics to the problem of the imaginary itself. Creating a vast network of texts, personalities, and chemicals, the book reveals the ways in which minute shifts among these elements have resulted in "drugs" and "literature" as we conceive of them today.

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  • "From the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this far-reaching work. Drawing on history, science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography, Marcus Boon shows that the concept of drugs is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and reveals how different sets of connections between disciplines configure each drug's unique history. In chapters on opiates, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and psychedelics, Boon traces the history of the relationship between writers and specific drugs, and between these drugs and literary and philosophical traditions. With reference to the usual suspects from De Quincey to Freud to Irvine Welsh and with revelations about others such as Milton, Voltaire, Thoreau, and Sartre, The Road of Excess provides a novel and persuasive characterization of the "effects" of each class of drug--linking narcotic addiction to Gnostic spirituality, stimulant use to writing machines, anesthesia to transcendental philosophy, and psychedelics to the problem of the imaginary itself. Creating a vast network of texts, personalities, and chemicals, the book reveals the ways in which minute shifts among these elements have resulted in "drugs" and "literature" as we conceive of them today."@en
  • "From the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this far-reaching work. Drawing on history, science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography, Marcus Boon shows that the concept of drugs is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and reveals how different sets of connections between disciplines configure each drug's unique history. In chapters on opiates, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and psychedelics, Boon traces the history of the relationship between writers and specific drugs, and between these drugs and literary and philosophical traditions. With reference to the usual suspects from De Quincey to Freud to Irvine Welsh and with revelations about others such as Milton, Voltaire, Thoreau, and Sartre, The Road of Excess provides a novel and persuasive characterization of the "effects" of each class of drug--linking narcotic addiction to Gnostic spirituality, stimulant use to writing machines, anesthesia to transcendental philosophy, and psychedelics to the problem of the imaginary itself. Creating a vast network of texts, personalities, and chemicals, the book reveals the ways in which minute shifts among these elements have resulted in "drugs" and "literature" as we conceive of them today."
  • "In this study, I examine the history of the association of literature and drugs. In a series of essays I explore the history of opiates, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants and psychedelics, and provide an account of how each substance was described in literature. I show the ways in which historical, scientific and literary elements are interconnected in the concept of drugs, and I argue that each drug or group of drugs has a discourse that is specific to it."@en
  • "I show that there are literary discourses that make use of psychoactive substances throughout history (for example, the figure of Circe in Renaissance epic poetry or hashish in medieval Islam), but that the notion of a writer "experimenting" with drugs is specific to the post-Romantic era. The emergence of drug literature can be traced to a set of unusual alliances between medical researchers, philosophers and writers (Novalis, Sir Humphry Davy, De Quincey, Baudelaire and William James) and is the result of the growing divide in the nineteenth century between a scientific discourse about nature on the one hand, and a post-Kantian aesthetic discourse that explores the nature of subjectivity on the other hand. Drug literature is a hybrid genre in which the forbidden but necessary fusion of nature and culture, which is an essential part of the human condition, finds expression. As laws forbidding drug use come into effect at the beginning of the twentieth century, drugs become part of a culture of transgression and sensation that plays a crucial role in literary movements such as the avant-garde (Artaud, Junger, Michaux and Burroughs) and popular genre fiction and journalism (Dickens, Rohmer and Hunter S. Thompson). I conclude with an examination of Prozac and Ecstasy in contemporary literature and the role of drug literature in a society increasingly dominated by biochemical discourse."@en

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  • "Livres électroniques"
  • "Electronic books"@en
  • "Dissertations, Academic"@en
  • "Academic dissertations"@en
  • "Criticism, interpretation, etc"@en
  • "Criticism, interpretation, etc"

name

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  • "The road of excess: A history of writers on drugs"@en
  • "The road of excess : a history of writers on drugs"@en
  • "The road of excess : a history of writers on drugs"
  • "The road of excess a history of writers on drugs"
  • "The road of excess a history of writers on drugs"@en
  • "The Road of Excess A History of Writers on Drugs"

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