Writing Habits: Addiction Literature's Past and Present

There is a generally accepted historiography of addiction which situates the discovery, articulation, or ‘invention’ of the phenomenon no earlier than the nineteenth century. Recently, however, some early modern critics have begun to push back against this espoused conceptual watershed point, to consider engagements with and depictions of addiction in texts which date as far back as the sixteenth century. This thesis goes further in this work of temporal realignment in its consideration of addiction as a transhistorical and transcultural aspect of the human condition. The nineteenth century can be argued to be the point of ‘invention’ for some of our modern medical and psychiatric models of addiction, but, as Mary Shelly writes, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.” This thesis illuminates the premodern linguistic and narrative materials of addiction discourse and argues for Addiction Literature to be considered as a distinct literary phenomenon, with roots stretching back to Antiquity. Addiction, as it is understood in this thesis, exists at the intersection between appetite, habit and impaired personal behavioural agency. This thesis begins by exploring the ways in which we articulate the experience (both lived and observed) of addiction today, uncovering a core set of conceptual components and discursive tropes which are commonly associated with modern understandings of the phenomenon. It then considers premodern texts through this lens, revealing similar patterns of conception and convention in a broad range of historical periods and literary genres from Aesop to Shakespeare.