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Equivocal Spirits: Alcoholism and Drinking in Twentieth-Century Literature
The book offers a socio-critical analysis of the alcoholic perception in the poetry and fiction of modern American alcoholic writers. Matts Djos focuses on primary indicators of alcohol addiction (fear, manipulation, anger, loneliness, and antic-social behavior) and their expression in modern American literature. After providing a general foundation for analysis of the psychological effects of the disease, this volume scrutinizes the work of Ernest Hemingway, John Berryman, E.A. Robinson, Hart Crane, Theodore Roetheke, Robert Lowell, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner. The detail provides critical and in-depth perspective on the workings of the alcoholic mind.
Crowley (English, Syracuse U.) examines the relationship between intoxication and addiction in American life and letters during the first half of the 20th century. He focuses on representative fictions by authors such as W.D. Howells, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, defines the "drunk narrative," and considers the historical formation of alcoholism and earlier concepts of habitual drunkenness and their bearing on the social construction of gender roles. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Why were so many authors of the greatest works of literature consumed by alcoholism? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links between creativity and drink in the overlapping work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. From Hemingway's Key West to Williams's New Orleans, Laing pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, and strips away the tangle of mythology to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
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With Reading Alcoholisms, Jane Lilienfeld has produced a ground-breaking cross-disciplinary study using the social, psychological, and scientific literature on alcoholism and family alcoholism to examine the novels of Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf. Each of these authors was directly affected by the alcoholism of a family member or mentor, and Lilienfeld shows how the effects of alcoholism organized their texts: through the portrayal of a protagonist in The Mayor of Casterbridge, through the denial of parental alcoholism and its silent presence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and through codependent reactive patterns of Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. With the remarkable empathy Lilienfeld has for human dimensions of alcoholism, she demonstrates that "the narrative strategies in each of these novels at times mimic the behaviors and feeling states often arising from alcoholism." Without an understanding of the multidimensional nature of alcoholism and the transmission of its effects across generations, any analysis of the work of these three literary giants is incomplete.
Why were so many authors of the greatest works of literature consumed by alcoholism? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links between creativity and drink in the overlapping work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. From Hemingway's Key West to Williams's New Orleans, Laing pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, and strips away the tangle of mythology to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.