By Nicholas O. Warner
Spirits of the USA is the 1st book-length research of intoxication as represented in nineteenth-century American literature. Emphasizing the writings of such significant figures as Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Alcott, and Stowe, Nicholas O. Warner combines literary research with sociohistorical views to ascertain social and literary discourses of intoxicant use. Warner analyzes the literary remedy of alcoholism, drunkenness, "normal" ingesting, drug habit, and intoxicant selection, exhibiting how those concerns tie in with higher, an important questions in American tradition similar to own and political freedom, gender roles, individualism as opposed to conformity, and the yank Dream. In demonstrating either the literal and symbolic importance of intoxication in antebellum literature, the writer unearths the excellent quantity to which intoxication turned linked to literature itself and with supposedly literary values, in place of these of the rising industrial-capitalist state. Spirits of the US demonstrates the pervasiveness, complexity, and importance of a regularly overlooked yet vital topic in American literature, one who touches on simple facets of human habit, notion, and recognition and that has preoccupied a lot of our best writers. an important contribution to the sector of yankee stories, this ebook will attract literary students, historians, and a person with an curiosity in problems with alcohol and drug use.