American Psychotrope

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The consumption and conception of psychotropes in American culture has often been at the crux of a social and aesthetic struggle, torn between values of rebellion and limitation, subjective liberty and addicted enslavement, iconoclasm and structuring social norms. This issue interrogates the notion of psychotropic affect and states across an American culture and literature historically conditioned by a range of counter movements of limitation and control. It explores a range of issues, with contributions on: alcohol in antebellum American culture, opium dens in the nineteenth century, the addiction to thought in Emerson, LSD and viruses in Burroughs and Huxley, psilocybin mushrooms and Native American imagery in 1950s media, Cold War paranoia as a psychotropic state, as well as language as intoxication in David Foster Wallace. Contributors: Lindsey Banco, Sylvie Bauer, Irène Delcourt, Yves Gardes, Scott Martin, Pierre-Louis Patoine, Stephen Siff.