Drinking to excess has been a striking problem for industrial and post-industrial societies – who is responsible when a ‘free’ individual opts for a slow suicide? The causes of such drinking have often been blamed on heredity, moral weakness, ‘disease’ (addiction), hedonism, and Romantic illusion. Yet there is another reason which may be more fundamental and which has been overlooked or dismissed, and it is that the drinker may act with sincere philosophical intent. The Existential Drinker looks at the convergence of a new kind of excessive, habitual drinking, beginning in the nineteenth century, and a new way of thinking about the self which in the twentieth century comes to be labelled ‘Existential’. A substantial introduction covers questions of self, will, consciousness, authenticity, and ethics in relation to drinking, while introducing aspects of Existential thought pertinent to the discussion. The Existential-drinker canon is anchored in Jack London’s ‘alcoholic memoir’ John Barleycorn (1913), where London claims he can get at the truth of existence only through the insights afforded by excessive and repeated alcohol use. The book then covers drinker-texts such as Jean Rhys’s interwar novels, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend and John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, along with less well-known works such as Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow–Petushki, and A. L. Kennedy’s Paradise. The book will appeal to anybody with an interest in drinking and literature, as well as those with more specialised concerns in drinking studies, Existentialism, twentieth-century literature, and medical humanities.
CRITICAL POWERS
Series Editors:
Bert van den Brink (University of Utrecht),
Antony Simon Laden (University of Illinois, Chicago),
Peter Niesen (University of Hamburg) and
David Owen (University of Southampton).
Critical Powers is dedicated to constructing dialogues around innovative and original work in social and political theory. The ambition of the series is to be pluralist in welcoming work from different philosophical traditions and theoretical orientations, ranging from abstract conceptual argument to concrete policy-relevant engagements, and encouraging dialogue across the diverse approaches that populate the field of social and political theory. All the volumes in the series are structured as dialogues in which a lead essay is greeted with a series of responses before a reply by the lead essayist. Such dialogues spark debate, foster understanding, encourage innovation and perform the drama of thought in a way that engages a wide audience of scholars and students.
Published by Bloomsbury
On Global Citizenship,
Justice, Democracy and the Right to Justification,
Published by Manchester University Press
Cinema, democracy and perfectionism: Joshua Foa Dienstag in dialogue, Joshua Foa Dienstag (ed)
Forthcoming from Manchester University Press
Rogue Theodicy – Politics and power in the shadow of justice,
Law and Violence,
Autonomy Gaps,
Toleration, Liberty and the Right to Justification,
Democratic inclusion
Rainer Bauböck in dialogue
Manchester University Press
Copyright © Manchester University Press 2018
While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors.
This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Published by Manchester University Press
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
ISBN 978 1 5261 0522 6 hardback
ISBN 978 1 5261 0523 3 paperback
ISBN 978 1 5261 0525 7 open access
First published 2018
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