The white logic: alcoholism and gender in American modernist fiction
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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Crowley, John William (Author)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Amherst University of Massachusetts Press ©1994
Subjects:
Online Access:FAW01
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Item Description:Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references (pages 159-193) and index
From intemperance to alcoholism in the fiction of W.D. Howells -- Memoirs of an alcoholic: John Barelycorn -- Bulls, balls, and booze: The sun also rises -- The drunkard's holiday: Tender is the night -- The infernal grove: Appointment in Samarra -- Transcendence downward: Nightwood -- After the lost generation: The lost weekend
"There are no second acts in American lives." F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous pronouncement, an epitaph for his own foreshortened career, points out a pattern of imaginative blight common to writers of the Lost Generation. As John W. Crowley shows in this engaging study, excessive drinking had a crucial effect on the frequently diminished fortunes of these writers. Indeed, the modernists - especially the men - were a decidedly drunken lot. The first extended literary analysis to take account of recent work by social historians on the temperance movement, this book examines the relationship between intoxication and addiction in American life and letters during the first half of the twentieth century. In explaining the transition from Victorian to modern paradigms of heavy drinking, Crowley focuses on representative fictions. He considers the historical formation of "alcoholism" and earlier concepts of habitual drunkenness and their bearing on the social construction of gender roles. He also defines the "drunk narrative," a mode of fiction that expresses the conjunction of modernism and alcoholism in a pervasive ideology of despair - the White Logic of John Barleycorn, London's nihilistic lord of the spirits
Physical Description:1 Online-Ressource (xi, 202 pages)
ISBN:0585083312
0870239317
9780585083315
9780870239311

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