Substance Use and Abuse in the Long Nineteenth Century
13th – 14th September 2018
Edge Hill University
Speakers:
Professor Susan Zieger, University of California Riverside
Dr Noelle Plack, Newman University
Dr Douglas Small, University of Glasgow
‘The body (follow me closely here) lies at the mercy of the most omnipotent of all potentates—the Chemist.’
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859)
In The Woman in White Collins’s villainous Count Fosco expounds on the power of modern pharmacology. Fosco is speaking at the mid-point of a century wherein the body and the mind seemed increasingly easily affected by the influence of substances. From 1821 opium had allowed Thomas de Quincey to explore ‘the palimpsest of the human mind’ and navigate the dream space of the human subconscious. Ether and chloroform banished pain and facilitated new surgical innovations. Stimulants and sedatives regulated waking and sleeping and the working day in between. Reports of alcoholism, addiction and criminality appeared with increasing regularity in the periodical press and featured in the plots of new literary genres like the sensation novel and the detective story.
This two day interdisciplinary conference examines the changing roles of drugs and chemical substances in the history, literature, and medical discourses of the long nineteenth century. We invite proposals for 15-20 minute papers or panels on any aspect of the theme. Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Addiction and excess: Alcohol, tobacco, opiates, cocaine, ether, chloroform and other compounds
- Psychoactive substances, hallucinogenics, pharmacology
- New drug treatments, therapies, medical technologies, pain and pain management
- Concepts of stimulation and sedation
- Drugs and creativity
- Drugs and criminality
- Substances and the media: celebrity culture, advertising,
- Thomas de Quincey, Coleridge, Keats, Wilkie Collins, L. T. Meade Conan Doyle,
- Novels, sensation fiction, and literature as addiction
- Gendered representations of substance use
- Aphrodisiacs, appetite and their suppressants
- Substances and the military, empire, trade, war
- Neo-Romantic or Neo-Victorian representations of substance use
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words together with a brief bio to substance18@edgehill.ac.uk by 21st May.
We are delighted to be able to award a number of postgraduate bursaries. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please include a 200-word explanation about how the conference relates to your research, along with a breakdown of your expenses.