By Nicholas O. Warner
Spirits of the United States is the 1st book-length research of intoxication as represented in nineteenth-century American literature. Emphasizing the writings of such significant figures as Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Alcott, and Stowe, Nicholas O. Warner combines literary research with sociohistorical views to ascertain social and literary discourses of intoxicant use. Warner analyzes the literary remedy of alcoholism, drunkenness, "normal" consuming, drug habit, and intoxicant selection, exhibiting how those concerns tie in with higher, the most important questions in American tradition reminiscent of own and political freedom, gender roles, individualism as opposed to conformity, and the yank Dream. In demonstrating either the literal and symbolic importance of intoxication in antebellum literature, the writer unearths the mind-blowing quantity to which intoxication turned linked to literature itself and with supposedly literary values, in place of these of the rising industrial-capitalist kingdom. Spirits of the USA demonstrates the pervasiveness, complexity, and value of a frequently ignored yet very important topic in American literature, one who touches on uncomplicated points of human habit, belief, and realization and that has preoccupied a lot of our best writers. an important contribution to the sphere of yankee reports, this publication will attract literary students, historians, and an individual with an curiosity in problems with alcohol and drug use.
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