George Eliot and Intoxication Dangerous Drugs for the Condition of England [Hardcover]

Throughout George Eliot's fiction, not only do a remarkable number of her characters act under the influence of unwise consumption of alcohol and opium, but drugs also recur often as metaphors and allusions. Together, they create an extensive pattern of drug/disease references that represent socio-political problems as diseases in a social body and solutions to those problems (especially solutions that depend on some kind of written language) as volatile remedies that retain the potential to either kill or cure.Preface Acknowledgements George Eliot and Victorian Intoxication Backgrounds and Landscapes The Early Fiction Public Houses: Unstable Language in Dangerous Places Parables of Addiction Romola: San Buonvino Felix Holt's Muddled Metaphors Middlemarch: 'Profit Out of Poisonous Pickles' Daniel Deronda: After the Opium Wars Epilogue Bibliography Index

'Kathleen McCormack's George Eliot and Intoxication is striking in its originality, definitively establishing the importance of alcohol and other drugs as fact and metaphor in both George Eliot's world and Victorian culture at large. There are many new interpretations for the general reader and specialists will need to assimilate the book's many new findings and often startling speculations.' - Michael Wolff, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

'...there is much in this lively study of intoxication that will stimulate.' - John Rignall, The George Eliot Review

'...this study is a valuable addition to George Eliot scholarship.' - Anna Despotopoulou, Essays in Criticism

Kathleen McCormack is Associate Professor of English in the State University System of Florida.