Reconsidering Drugs

Mapping Victorian and Modern Drug Discourses

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• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781349622399
• Print ISBN:
  9780312222727

Lawrence Driscoll's fresh examination of the meaning of drugs from the Victorians to the present asks us to listen to historical and current voices whose positions on drugs are at variance with our "truths." Driscoll draws on the work of figures as diverse as William Burroughs, Sigmund Freud, Conan Doyle, and Anna Kavan to shed light on different or silenced ways of talking about drugs and to offer us a historical counter-memory. The result of his work is to unsettle and disturb the familiar parameters that frame our discussion of drugs, revealing that others are available: positions which expose our own constructions as surprisingly limited.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 “Unpopular Everywhere,” or Forgetting the Self, Remembering Drugs
• Chapter 2 “A Creature Without Species”: Constructing Drug Users
• Chapter 3 “Pleasures Impossible to Interpret”: Freud and Cocaine
• Chapter 4 “The Doctor Does a Good Job”: William Burroughs’s Critique of Control
• Chapter 5 Planet Heroin: Women and Drugs
• Chapter 6 Up from Drug Slavery?: Drugs and Race in Contemporary America
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index