High without respite: a study of drug literature
Date
2014-06-24
Authors
Kowalska, Eva
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Abstract
Drug literature has a long history in Western culture, but is relatively little studied until
recently. In this thesis, I look at a wide range of texts across a number of chronological
and geographical contexts. In discussing the contextual influences, aesthetics,
representational concerns, themes and structures of these novels, memoirs, essays and
poems, individually as well as in conversation with one another, I trace and define a set
of characteristics singular to drug literature as genre, and argue that these markers are not
incidental, but fundamentally embedded in the concern of all these writers with
representing and constituting the often ineffable experience of drug use. I therefore argue
for the possibility of a ‘drug idiom’ in this type of literature. In addition, I conclude by
looking at critical modes of reading socially problematic texts which is sensitive to the
possibility of this idiom and its redemptive integrity.