General Introduction: Premodern Addiction and Addiction Literature

The central premise underpinning this book is that the subjective experience of what we today term as addiction can be viewed as a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon, and that literature was a locus for proto-addiction discourse long before the more scientific attempts over the past two centuries were made to formally medicalise and pathologise the experience as a specific disease. Addiction, as understood in this book, is not solely, or even primarily, linked to the use of intoxicants, but is regarded as a more universal issue of impaired personal agency, applicable to a broad range of appetites, behaviours and consumptions. This makes for an unconventionally eclectic group of texts being considered here, in terms of both literary period and literary genre. The specificity of this book does not reside in a close focus on one particular book, author or period, but in the transhistorical nature of the mode of expressing one particular experience of the human condition. Above all, this book aims to question our inherited historiography of addiction through a thematic focus on a broad range of modern and premodern texts, many of which have not previously been considered as examples of Addiction Literature.