Reading De Quinceyan Rhetoric Against the Grain: An Actor-network-theory Approach
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2020
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53598-8_8
Abstract
Anuj Gupta reads the inter-textualities between Confessions and nineteenth-century medical texts on opium to argue that the concept of “anthropocentric utilitarianism” was the dominant discursive trope through which the nineteenth-century English public understood the drug effects of psychoactive substances. Literary as well as medical texts of the time imagined humans as subjects and the plant product opium as an inert object and conceptualised the latter only in terms of advantages/disadvantages to the former. Using an actor-network approach, Gupta offers a possible method to read these eighteenth-century texts on opium against the grain by re-contextualising them within a complex global history of human-plant co-evolution.
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Reading De Quinceyan Rhetoric Against the Grain: An Actor-Network-Theory Approach, in N. Roxburgh & J. S. Henke (Eds.), Psychopharmacology in British Literature and Culture, 1780–1900, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 155–170.
Scholar Commons Citation
Gupta, Anuj, "Reading De Quinceyan Rhetoric Against the Grain: An Actor-network-theory Approach" (2020). English Faculty Publications. 300.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/eng_facpub/300
