Prologue 1. Addicted to Nothingness: Narcotics and Literature 2. The Voice of the Blood: Transcendentalism and Anesthetic Revelation 3. The Time of the Assassins: Cannabis and Literature 4. Induced Life: Stimulants and Literature 5. The Imaginal Realms: Psychedelics and Literature Epilogue Bibliography Notes Acknowledgments Illustration Credits Index
The book's foundational strength is its scholarship. He uses citations not only for traditional scholarly support, but to delight, astonish, and engage the reader. It's too bad that bibliographies are out of fashion these days, since Boon's is a gem. He's done his homework several times over. He is a man after my own heart with his methodological bricolage, applying political, psychological, medical, anthropological and theological tactics according to the needs of the situation. The book is written in a buoyant tone, full of energy and excitement whether disclosing a juicy fact or working through a knotty argument. Although it is clearly an academic book, in the sense that it has footnotes and high scholarly standards, it could be enjoyed by any reader with an interest in literature - or drugs. When it finds unknown ground it is exciting, and when it recrosses more familiar zones it always finds a way to renew interest in them. -- David Lenson, author of On Drugs and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts The Road of Excess is a superbly researched and lucidly written compendium of fascinating information. It brings to light a history that has heretofore been largely repressed and details the enormous impact of drugs and altered consciousness on European and American literary cultures. -- Nicholas Bromell, Professor of English, University of Massachusetts
Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University, Toronto.
The book's foundational strength is its scholarship. He uses
citations not only for traditional scholarly support, but to
delight, astonish, and engage the reader. It's too bad that
bibliographies are out of fashion these days, since Boon's is a
gem. He's done his homework several times over. He is a man after
my own heart with his methodological bricolage, applying political,
psychological, medical, anthropological and theological tactics
according to the needs of the situation. The book is written in a
buoyant tone, full of energy and excitement whether disclosing a
juicy fact or working through a knotty argument. Although it is
clearly an academic book, in the sense that it has footnotes and
high scholarly standards, it could be enjoyed by any reader with an
interest in literature - or drugs. When it finds unknown ground it
is exciting, and when it recrosses more familiar zones it always
finds a way to renew interest in them.
*David Lenson, author of On Drugs and Professor of
Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts*
The Road of Excess is a superbly researched and lucidly written
compendium of fascinating information. It brings to light a history
that has heretofore been largely repressed and details the enormous
impact of drugs and altered consciousness on European and American
literary cultures.
*Nicholas Bromell, Professor of English, University of
Massachusetts*
Lucid, startling survey of significant writers and their cozy,
quasi-scientific relationships with drugs...A well-executed,
deliberative study that effectively reclaims and demystifies key
written representations of drug experience.
*Kirkus Reviews*
Instead of providing a chronological history of drugs in
literature, Boon offers a sprawling, extensively researched work
that explores the "more subtle, micropolitical histories of
everyday interactions between human beings and particular
psychoactive substances." Each of the book's five chapters focuses
on writers…and works associated with a particular class of
drugs...This is a solid work of scholarship.
*Library Journal*
Writers have been taking drugs as long as there have been drugs to
be had, and--as we learn from Marcus Boon's fascinating and
meticulous The Road of Excess--the line is blurred, in fact
invisible, between those writers who take drugs to inflame or exalt
their demons and those who simply need, in Aldous Huxley's phrase,
"a chemical vacation from intolerable selfhood"...The Road of
Excess does the field of drug studies a great service by providing
a clear narrative of literature's long romance with drugs, and by
relating each substance to a specific creative enterprise.
*Boston Globe*
The Road of Excess...focuses on the external conditions that
prompted some of the world's most famous storytellers to smoke,
snort and swallow their way to notoriety...By providing social,
economic, ethnographic, scientific, and religious perspective as
the foundation of his observations, Boon realizes his mandate by
offering fascinating context and insight to a timeline that dates
back to Homer's Odyssey.
*Toronto Star*
Boon's observations speak as much to our scientific understanding
of the brain as to our literary appreciation of writers like Henri
Michaux and Charles Baudelaire, William Burroughs and Will Self,
and they deserve close criticism. This alone makes Boon's ironic
and perceptive book very welcome: It is that rare creature, a work
of literary criticism that the scientific community can enjoy,
contend with, and from which it can draw inspiration.
*New Scientist*
Marcus Boon...tilled the well-seeded territory of druggy
writers...and now brings it to fruition in The Road of Excess...His
feat suggests that even in a literature department, a lively
empirical topic can survive years of deconstructive indoctrination
and cultural-studies overkill...Boon's enterprising research soon
takes the reader to intoxicating places...He proceeds incisively,
his double-helix narrative intertwining a fine strand of scholarly
detail with an ongoing argument for transcendental subjectivity's
importance to literature--so powerful an influence it almost
behooves writers to experiment with drugs...The most arresting
strain of Boon's book is thus its vast historical sweep. Like the
pal in the park believed to have "tried everything," Boon appears
to have read everything concerned with writers and drugs.
*Chronicle of Higher Education*
For the British romantics--Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, de
Quincey--it was opium. For Proust, Guy de Maupassant and William
James, it was anesthetics--either and nitrous oxide. Balzac,
Coleridge, Rimbaud, Yeats and the Beats all smoked, ate and drank
cannabis. Balzac's speedy writing was fueled by vast quantities of
caffeine; Kerouac chewed Benzedrine to hurry his typing. Then there
are such famous names as Leary, de Kooning, Bowles, Thompson and,
of course, the king of literary druggies, William S. Burroughs,
those day trippers who happily wrote while consuming all manner of
psychedelics--peyote, mescaline, acid. All this social, literary
and pharmaceutical history is considered in a thoughtful but
engaging style by Marcus Boon.
*Toronto Star*
Boon has written the most useful and engaging history of
psychoactive lit yet. His prose is generous, unhurried, and far too
tasteful to gob up the page with theory. At the same time, he casts
his net deep and wide, drawing in folks as disparate as Chaucer,
Kant, and Iceberg Slim. Boon is not content to merely record the
encounter between modern writers and drugs; he deepens the story as
well, and, amazingly, he does it without exploiting the rhetoric of
personal experience or subversive hip.
*Bookforum*
The first thing to say about Marcus Boon's Road of Excess is that
he has certainly done the research...This [is a] valuable,
philosophically provocative and sometimes quite moving work of
literary criticism...Boon has read everything from Homer's Odyssey,
with its description of the lotus plant, to the underground comics
of Robert Crumb. And he can step outside literature to show a
knowledge of a far wider cultural world.
*Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News*
This meticulous exploration of the influence of narcotics on
literature is like a late-night literary overdose...[Boon's]
academic background shines through without bogging down this
intriguing subject...The Road of Excess is broken down into five
sections based on a specific realm of drug: opiates, anaesthetics,
cannabis, stimulants (coffee, cocaine and amphetamines) and
psychedelics. There is a historical logic to the structure that
reflects both the social norms and the scientific discoveries of
the time. It is this that makes Excess a riveting read as Boon
describes the high-fashion accessory of hand-crafted syringes to
inject morphine in public or the introduction of opium via Chinese
workers in Europe. Boon has explored the cultures around his
literary figures with methodical devotion, creating a colorful, if
at times, frightening sense of time and place...[Boon's] writing is
largely a clear, calm and extraordinarily researched discussion of
strange visions, odd lives and often marvelous writing.
*The Age*
In an impressive display of scholarship, Boon meticulously
chronicles the connection between writers and drugs. From Samuel
Taylor Coleridge to Jack Kerouac, writers' personal odysseys into
the dizzying world of drugs are depicted with a novelist's eye for
detail. Boon...creates order of this heretofore largely uncharted
history in five well-rounded essays examining how literature has
been influenced by narcotics, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants,
and psychedelics. Through liberal use of anecdotes, Boon helps
transform what could have been a dry recitation of cultural and
literary artifacts into a feast of historical surprises...Though it
is a scholarly endeavor, Boon's new work reads more like a
wide-eyed, joyous romp through a literary statesman's funhouse,
where each room contains a masterfully told tale of opium or
morphine, peyote or LSD, coffee or cocaine. We see a gallery of our
most prized literary lions, many of them stripped bare of their
pristine reputations. It is a mind-teasing exercise that is well
worth the trip.
*Boston Globe*
A scrupulously researched and splendidly written tome that is a joy
to read and a challenge to digest.
*Books in Canada*
This meticulous exploration of the influence of narcotics on
literature is like a late night literary overdose...[It is] a
riveting read as Boon describes the high fashion accessory of
hand-crafted syringes to inject morphine in public or the
introduction of opium via the presence of Chinese workers in
Europe. Boon has explored the cultures around his literary figures
with methodical devotion, creating a colourful, if at times
frightening, sense of time and place. At one moment we are in the
salons of Victorian London smoking opium with Coleridge before
charging into more contemporary times watching Jack Kerouac hitting
the Benzedrine and the typewriter...Boon's writing is largely a
clear, calm and extraordinarily researched discussion of strange
visions, odd lives and often marvelous writing.
*frontwheeldrive.com*
The book's foundational strength is its scholarship. He uses
citations not only for traditional scholarly support, but to
delight, astonish, and engage the reader. It's too bad that
bibliographies are out of fashion these days, since Boon's is a
gem. He's done his homework several times over. He is a man after
my own heart with his methodological bricolage, applying political,
psychological, medical, anthropological and theological tactics
according to the needs of the situation. The book is written in a
buoyant tone, full of energy and excitement whether disclosing a
juicy fact or working through a knotty argument. Although it is
clearly an academic book, in the sense that it has footnotes and
high scholarly standards, it could be enjoyed by any reader with an
interest in literature - or drugs. When it finds unknown ground it
is exciting, and when it recrosses more familiar zones it always
finds a way to renew interest in them. -- David Lenson, author of
On Drugs and Professor of Comparative Literature at the
University of Massachusetts
The Road of Excess is a superbly researched and lucidly
written compendium of fascinating information. It brings to light a
history that has heretofore been largely repressed and details the
enormous impact of drugs and altered consciousness on European and
American literary cultures. -- Nicholas Bromell, Professor of
English, University of Massachusetts
Lucid, startling survey of significant writers and their cozy,
quasi-scientific relationships with drugs...A well-executed,
deliberative study that effectively reclaims and demystifies key
written representations of drug experience. * Kirkus Reviews *
Instead of providing a chronological history of drugs in
literature, Boon offers a sprawling, extensively researched work
that explores the "more subtle, micropolitical histories of
everyday interactions between human beings and particular
psychoactive substances." Each of the book's five chapters focuses
on writers...and works associated with a particular class of
drugs...This is a solid work of scholarship. -- William D. Walsh *
Library Journal *
Writers have been taking drugs as long as there have been drugs to
be had, and--as we learn from Marcus Boon's fascinating and
meticulous The Road of Excess--the line is blurred, in fact
invisible, between those writers who take drugs to inflame or exalt
their demons and those who simply need, in Aldous Huxley's phrase,
"a chemical vacation from intolerable selfhood"...The Road of
Excess does the field of drug studies a great service by
providing a clear narrative of literature's long romance with
drugs, and by relating each substance to a specific creative
enterprise. -- James Parker * Boston Globe *
The Road of Excess...focuses on the external conditions that
prompted some of the world's most famous storytellers to smoke,
snort and swallow their way to notoriety...By providing social,
economic, ethnographic, scientific, and religious perspective as
the foundation of his observations, Boon realizes his mandate by
offering fascinating context and insight to a timeline that dates
back to Homer's Odyssey. -- Nick Krewen * Toronto Star *
Boon's observations speak as much to our scientific understanding
of the brain as to our literary appreciation of writers like Henri
Michaux and Charles Baudelaire, William Burroughs and Will Self,
and they deserve close criticism. This alone makes Boon's ironic
and perceptive book very welcome: It is that rare creature, a work
of literary criticism that the scientific community can enjoy,
contend with, and from which it can draw inspiration. -- Simon Ings
* New Scientist *
Marcus Boon...tilled the well-seeded territory of druggy
writers...and now brings it to fruition in The Road of
Excess...His feat suggests that even in a literature
department, a lively empirical topic can survive years of
deconstructive indoctrination and cultural-studies
overkill...Boon's enterprising research soon takes the reader to
intoxicating places...He proceeds incisively, his double-helix
narrative intertwining a fine strand of scholarly detail with an
ongoing argument for transcendental subjectivity's importance to
literature--so powerful an influence it almost behooves writers to
experiment with drugs...The most arresting strain of Boon's book is
thus its vast historical sweep. Like the pal in the park believed
to have "tried everything," Boon appears to have read everything
concerned with writers and drugs. -- Carlin Romano * Chronicle of
Higher Education *
For the British romantics--Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, de
Quincey--it was opium. For Proust, Guy de Maupassant and William
James, it was anesthetics--either and nitrous oxide. Balzac,
Coleridge, Rimbaud, Yeats and the Beats all smoked, ate and drank
cannabis. Balzac's speedy writing was fueled by vast quantities of
caffeine; Kerouac chewed Benzedrine to hurry his typing. Then there
are such famous names as Leary, de Kooning, Bowles, Thompson and,
of course, the king of literary druggies, William S. Burroughs,
those day trippers who happily wrote while consuming all manner of
psychedelics--peyote, mescaline, acid. All this social, literary
and pharmaceutical history is considered in a thoughtful but
engaging style by Marcus Boon. -- Dan Smith * Toronto Star *
Boon has written the most useful and engaging history of
psychoactive lit yet. His prose is generous, unhurried, and far too
tasteful to gob up the page with theory. At the same time, he casts
his net deep and wide, drawing in folks as disparate as Chaucer,
Kant, and Iceberg Slim. Boon is not content to merely record the
encounter between modern writers and drugs; he deepens the story as
well, and, amazingly, he does it without exploiting the rhetoric of
personal experience or subversive hip. -- Erik Davis * Bookforum
*
The first thing to say about Marcus Boon's Road of Excess is
that he has certainly done the research...This [is a] valuable,
philosophically provocative and sometimes quite moving work of
literary criticism...Boon has read everything from Homer's
Odyssey, with its description of the lotus plant, to the
underground comics of Robert Crumb. And he can step outside
literature to show a knowledge of a far wider cultural world. --
Steven Rosen * Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News *
This meticulous exploration of the influence of narcotics on
literature is like a late-night literary overdose...[Boon's]
academic background shines through without bogging down this
intriguing subject...The Road of Excess is broken down into
five sections based on a specific realm of drug: opiates,
anaesthetics, cannabis, stimulants (coffee, cocaine and
amphetamines) and psychedelics. There is a historical logic to the
structure that reflects both the social norms and the scientific
discoveries of the time. It is this that makes Excess a
riveting read as Boon describes the high-fashion accessory of
hand-crafted syringes to inject morphine in public or the
introduction of opium via Chinese workers in Europe. Boon has
explored the cultures around his literary figures with methodical
devotion, creating a colorful, if at times, frightening sense of
time and place...[Boon's] writing is largely a clear, calm and
extraordinarily researched discussion of strange visions, odd lives
and often marvelous writing. -- Ashley Crawford * The Age *
In an impressive display of scholarship, Boon meticulously
chronicles the connection between writers and drugs. From Samuel
Taylor Coleridge to Jack Kerouac, writers' personal odysseys into
the dizzying world of drugs are depicted with a novelist's eye for
detail. Boon...creates order of this heretofore largely uncharted
history in five well-rounded essays examining how literature has
been influenced by narcotics, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants,
and psychedelics. Through liberal use of anecdotes, Boon helps
transform what could have been a dry recitation of cultural and
literary artifacts into a feast of historical surprises...Though it
is a scholarly endeavor, Boon's new work reads more like a
wide-eyed, joyous romp through a literary statesman's funhouse,
where each room contains a masterfully told tale of opium or
morphine, peyote or LSD, coffee or cocaine. We see a gallery of our
most prized literary lions, many of them stripped bare of their
pristine reputations. It is a mind-teasing exercise that is well
worth the trip. -- Rebecca Shannonhouse * Boston Globe *
A scrupulously researched and splendidly written tome that is a joy
to read and a challenge to digest. -- Gordon Phinn * Books in
Canada *
This meticulous exploration of the influence of narcotics on
literature is like a late night literary overdose...[It is] a
riveting read as Boon describes the high fashion accessory of
hand-crafted syringes to inject morphine in public or the
introduction of opium via the presence of Chinese workers in
Europe. Boon has explored the cultures around his literary figures
with methodical devotion, creating a colourful, if at times
frightening, sense of time and place. At one moment we are in the
salons of Victorian London smoking opium with Coleridge before
charging into more contemporary times watching Jack Kerouac hitting
the Benzedrine and the typewriter...Boon's writing is largely a
clear, calm and extraordinarily researched discussion of strange
visions, odd lives and often marvelous writing. -- Ashley Crawford
* frontwheeldrive.com *
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