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Heroin(e) Habits: Potential and Possibility in Female Drug Literature
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Heroin(e) Habits: Potential and Possibility in Female Drug Literature

Nycole Prowse
Gylphi Limited
2018
url
https://www.gylphi.co.uk/books/ProwseView
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Abstract

Literary Studies drugs in literature drug abuse in literature drug addiction in literature literature
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.

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