Drunkard's Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair, and Recovery
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.58 (986 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0801860083 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 216 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-08-24 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
John W. Crowley is a professor of English and director of the Humanities Doctoral Program at Syracuse University, where he has taught since 1970. Best known as a scholar of William Dean Howells, he has written other works on alcohol-related topics, including the widely praised The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction.
"Crowley's editing is discreet and his introductions to the individual selections provide brief yet instructive contextual backgrounds He has done a valuable service in 'recovering' these narrative of despair and hope and placing them at the disposal of a wide range of possible readers and researchers." -- Ian Baird, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History
A unique collection of "drunk narratives" f Holly Hassel Crowley is not really the author of this book but the editor. _Drunkard's Progress_ is Crowley's collection of a genre of prose, the "confessions" of the alcoholic. Crowley's contextualizing essay does a nice job connecting the told-story, or the ritual of recounting alcoholic experiences with the first groups, like the Washington group, who employed this as a tactic toward achieving sobriety. Crowley also makes connections with the similar ritual within modern day recovery groups. As a contemporary literature scholar, I found Crowley's previous text, _Th
Gough's Autobiography, published in 1845), recovering "drunkards" described their enslavement to and liberation from alcohol. The tales, including "The Experience Meeting," from T. Crowley, the origin of these movements -- including Alcoholics Anonymous -- lies in the Washingtonian Temperance Society, founded in Baltimore in the 1840s. In lectures, pamphlets, and books (most notably John B. I wept, I groaned, I actually tore my hair; I did every thing but the one thing that could have saved me." -- from Confessions of a Female Inebriate, excerpted in Drunkard's Progress. S. According to John W. Contemporary readers familiar