Chronic Habits: The Literature of Dissipation in the Long Eighteenth Century Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

Chronic Habits revises the literary and cultural histories of disability and addiction by examining the prevalence of “dissipation” in the literature of the long eighteenth century. At the turn of the eighteenth century, men and women were regarded as “dissipated” if they recklessly and repeatedly outspent their income. By the Romantic period, however, “dissipation” came to refer to the behaviors that led to overspending—gambling, fashionable living, and, especially, habitual drug use. While disability studies and addiction studies focus primarily on the emergence of disability and addiction as medical problems in the nineteenth century, Chronic Habits reveals that those medical models can derive from the earlier moral models they are thought to replace. In sermons and medical and moral tracts, dissipation emerges in this moment as a fraught discursive site where economic, moral, and medical knowledges intersect and overlap. However, Samuel Johnson, Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Maria Edgeworth, and John Keats each challenge that convergence by presenting atypical bodies and chemically induced mental states that contest both the moral paradigms imposed by their contemporaries and the new medical paradigms just coming into being. In employing literary modes to dissolve the moral and medical boundaries of dissipation, these authors find in dissipation productive ways to dissipate and re-construct the conventions of their chosen literary forms. Dissipation’s tendency to enable literary innovation remains a largely unconsidered aspect of the history of eighteenth-century literature. As it crosses genres and traditional literary periods, “dissipation” becomes, for Johnson, a cure for madness and a model for profiting in the new literary marketplace; for Coleridge and Robinson, a mode of collaborative thinking and literary production; for Edgeworth, a site of proto-feminist resistance against the normalizing force of eighteenth-century medicine and the generic conventions of the novel; and for Keats, a provocative and productive model for artistic creation. By engaging with dissipation’s various pleasures and dangers, these authors show us how markets, discourses, and literary genres that ostensibly produce independent subjects ultimately produce, and even require, dependent ones.    

Table of Contents

 

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….….1

 

Chapter 1: “Some Sweet Oblivious Antidote”: The Doctor in/on Pain……………………….…38

 

Chapter 2: “Forced Unconscious Sympathy”: Coleridge and Robinson’s Romantic Co-Dependencies…………………………………………………………………………………….89

 

Chapter 3: “Grotesque Mixture[s]”: Feminine Dissipation in Edgeworth’s Belinda…………..145

 

Chapter 4: Romantic Withdrawal: Critical Rehabilitation and Keatsean Dissipation………….196

 

Coda…………………………………………………………………………………………….249

 

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….255

About this Dissertation

Rights statement

• Permission granted by the author to include this thesis or dissertation in this repository. All rights reserved by the author. Please contact the author for information regarding the reproduction and use of this thesis or dissertation.

School	Laney Graduate School
Department	English
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, English
Mot-clé	disability studies addiction studies Romanticism Eighteenth-Century Studies British literature
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	White, Deborah Elise, Emory University Kelleher, Paul, Emory University
Committee Members	Otis, Laura, Emory University Reiss, Benjamin, Emory University

Dernière modification

Primary PDF

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Actions
	File download under embargo until 21 May 2024	2018-04-12 10:08:49 -0400	File download under embargo until 21 May 2024

Supplemental Files

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Actions