| Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature Contributor(s): Banco, Lindsey Michael (Author) |
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ISBN: 0415998611 ISBN-13: 9780415998611 Publisher: Routledge OUR PRICE: $161.50 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: October 2009 Annotation: The study of travel literature and the study of literary representations of and philosophical inquiries into drugs and intoxication have grown increasingly prominent as independent fields of inquiry, but neither field has produced any sustained examination of the relationships between the two. In this volume, Banco examines interlocking representations of travel and drugs in the fiction of Burroughs, Huxley and others in order to assesses how and why metaphors of mobility help conceptualize the experience of intoxication as well as how and why drugs enable us to think about the pleasures and the pains of travel. He discovers that the juxtaposition of traveling and tripping - which he argues is often a process of spatializing intoxication-- raises important questions about identity, alterity, utopia, and capitalism. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | American - General - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh |
| Dewey: 820.932 |
| LCCN: 2009019935 |
| Series: Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature |
| Physical Information: 0.5" H x 5.98" W x 9.02" (0.96 lbs) 198 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - British Isles |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This book examines the connections between two disparate yet persistently bound thematics -- mobility and intoxication -- and explores their central yet frequently misunderstood role in constructing subjectivity following the 1960s. Emerging from profound mid-twentieth-century changes in how drugs and travel were imagined, the conceptual nexus discussed sheds new light on British and North American responses to sixties counterculture. With readings of Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Alex Garland, Hunter S. Thompson, and Robert Sedlack, Banco traces twin arguments, looking at the ways travel is imagined as a disciplinary force acting upon the creative, destabilizing powers of psychedelic intoxication; and exploring the ways drugs help construct travel spaces and practices as, at times, revolutionary, and at other times, neo-colonial. By following a sequence of shifting understandings of drug and travel orthodoxies, this book traverses fraught and irresistibly linked terrains from the late 1950s up to a period marked by international, postmodern tourism. As such, it helps illuminate a world where tourism is continually expanding yet constantly circumscribed, and where illegal drugs are both increasingly unregulated in the global economy and perceived more and more as crucial agents in the construction of human subjectivity. |
