Drunk the Night Before An Anatomy of Intoxication Marty Roth Table of Contents		$22.50 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-4398-1 $29.95 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-4397-4
Exposes the secret history of drink, from creative stimulant to addictive poison. This invigorating work traces the cultural history of convivial drinking before the concept of addiction overshadowed intoxication’s reputation as a creative, philosophical, and spiritual force. Marty Roth’s Drunk the Night Before illustrates altered consciousness from myth to contemporary life, laying bare the behaviors and beliefs, sacred and secular, invested in intoxication. From the days of antiquity to the twentieth century, Roth follows the often veiled language of intoxication through religion and aesthetics, poetry and art, popular festivals and film. In this sweeping work, he examines the cultural roots of love potions and the fountain of youth, drunkenness in Hollywood cinema, the religious concept of a spiritual high versus the condemnation of intoxication. Roth reinvigorates the currently rebuffed connection between intoxication and artistic creativity, taking up by turn the poet Anacreon and the canon of drink poetry—from classical Greek to the European lyric, Euripides’ Bacchae and the figure of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, the heavy investment of Western philosophy in intoxication, and the concepts of the carnivalesque in Friedrich Nietzsche and Mikhail Bakhtin. At once deeply erudite and irresistibly congenial, this encyclopedic work makes critical sense of the long history of alcohol as potion and poison, as pharmakon and catalyst, revealing altered states as the hidden thread in the story of sensation and Western cultural consciousness. “Drunk the Night Before reveals the long and ambivalent relationship between artistic creation and altered consciousness and shows definitively that intoxication has been both praised as indispensable for creative work and damned for its deleterious moral and aesthetic effects.” —David Lenson, author of On Drugs Marty Roth is professor emeritus of English at the University of Minnesota. His many works include Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction and Comedy. 256 pages | 6 x 9 | 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments                                                                                                            Introduction                                                                                                                        1. The Mysteries of Intoxication                                                                                    2. Drink Poetry; or, The Art of Feeling Very, Very Good                                    3. Double Dionysus: Ambiguities in the Discourse of Intoxication                        4. Socrates Undrunk: Literature Writing Philosophy in Plato’s Symposium                                                                                           5. “Out, loathed med’cine! O hated potion, hence!”: The Magic of Literary Drinks                                                                             6. Spiritual Intoxication and the Metaphorics of Heaven                                    7. Drinking in Style: A Horatian Aesthetic                                                            8. Carnival, Creativity, and the Sublimation of Drunkenness                                    Notes                                                                                                                                    Works Cited                                                                                                                        Publication History                                                                                                            Index

 

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