High without respite: a study of drug literature

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.