Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-284) and index.
Contents
Introduction: the varieties of intoxicated experience -- God's wine and devil's wine: the idea of intoxication in Emerson -- Little tippler's discerning eye: Dickinson and visionary drunkenness -- Beyond the sober eye of reason: Poe and the paradoxes of intoxication -- Gentleman's part: drinking and moral style in Cooper -- From conviviality to vision: intoxication in Hawthorne -- Too sober or too drunken: Melville's dialogics of drink -- Forbidden fruit: nineteenth-century American female authorship and the discourses of intoxication.