Heroin(e) Habits: Potential and Possibility in Female Drug Literature (Transgressive Culture, Band 2) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

This book traces addiction as a persistent and governing socio-literary trope, with the troping of narcotics in particular representing a problematic relation to Law. The book's central tenet is that a gendered reading of the individual's relation to Law can be acutely observed in women's drug writing. Far from writing into, or even against, a narco-literary tradition, women drug writers as examined here are like guerrilla-raiders on its vulnerable fringes where questions of 'Being-on-drugs' are always in doubt. It argues for the trope of addiction as an apparently extreme but ordinary expression of selfhood, which women drug writers consistently raid and challenge.

The book analyses a selection of female drug writing over the past two centuries including that of English authors Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Anna Kavan, American authors Emily Hahn and JT Leroy, and Australian author Helen Garner. To elucidate its argument on gender and addiction, the book includes a chapter on the female drug writers' male contemporaries, Thomas de Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William S. Burroughs and Luke Davis. It draws on theorists as diverse as Grosz, Shildrick, Price, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Bakhtin, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Deleuze, Guattari, Cavarero, Haraway and Ahmed. The book contributes to the fields of Literature, Sociology, Human Geography and History.

Review

Nycole Prowse takes an inroad to the complexity of themes and tropes of drug usage in literature. Peeling off histories of women in distress, without losing the existential edge of inescapable downturns, she discovers an ecstatic offramp: the experience of freedom, the risks and haunts of secret hideaways from strictures of oppressive normativity. Prowse tracks unapologetic pleasure domains and habits of narcissistic cocooning, the thrill of self-overcoming whether illusory or not prompting a kind of Nietzschean leap into life-affirming "irresponsibility." What a refreshing dose of untimeliness for our morally overbloated and corrupt era! --Avital Ronell, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, NYU

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