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Cocaine, Literature, and Culture, 1876-1930
The first significant study of cocaine in the literary and cultural imagination of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this open access book offers an important exploration of the drug's symbolic and metaphorical associations in the decades prior to its criminalization.
Examining the paradoxical position of cocaine in this period by looking at its role as an icon of technology, modernity and idealised medical identity, alongside developing notions of habituation and dependence, this book reads texts such as the Sherlock Holmes stories, by Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as work by Arthur Machen, W.C Morrow and Aleister Crowley. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.Book Details
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Publish Date: Jul 24th, 2025
- Pages: 264
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.21in - 6.14in - 1.00in - 1.00lb
- EAN: 9781350400139
- Categories: • English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh• Modern - 19th Century• Modern - 20th Century
About the Author
Saunders, Corinne: - Corinne Saunders is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. She specialises in medieval literature and the history of ideas and is Co-Investigator on the Hearing the Voice project and Collaborator on the Life of Breath project, both funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Murray, Stuart: - Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film and Director of Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds, UK. He is also the current Chair of the Wellcome Trust's Medical Humanities Expert Review Group. Stuart is the author of Disability and the Posthuman: Bodies, Technology and Cultural Futures and Autism as well as co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability.
Small, Douglas Rj: - Dr Douglas Small is a Lecturer in Nineteenth Century Literature at Edge Hill University, UK.
Park, Sowon: - Sowon Park is Assistant Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. She is the Principal Investigator of the Unconscious Memory Project funded by NEH and Co-PI of the AHRC-funded Prismatic Translation project. She specializes in neurocognitive literary criticism and Global Modernism. She is co-editor of the Global Asias series.
Woods, Angela: - Angela Woods is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Co-Director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. She is Co-Investigator on the Hearing the Voice project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities.
Praise for this book
"The first significant study of cocaine in the literary and cultural imagination of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this open access book offers an important exploration of the drug's symbolic and metaphorical associations in the decades prior to its criminalization." --British Association for Victorian Studies Newsletter
"Cocaine, Literature, and Culture presents a vital body of research and recovers lost and overlooked implications of the arrival of cocaine as both substance and metaphor. Drug history is suffused with ideological snares and retrospective impositions. Small's approach is not simply corrective but rather helps us to grasp the powerful effect of this singular substance on the Victorian cultural imagination." --Sean A. Witters, Senior Lecturer, University of Vermont, USA "Douglas R. J. Small's Cocaine, Literature and Culture, 1876-1930, is a refreshing exploration of cocaine in the public imagination, concentrating on cocaine as it appears in fictional narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ... There is engaging analysis of a range of fictional texts by Conan Doyle, Machen, Morrow, and Crowley. Overall, this is a highly readable and entertaining, text. Small's writing style is both fluent and entertaining, as he offers new and exciting perspectives on the use of cocaine during the period 1846-1930." --Jessica Thomas, The British Society for Literature and Science