"Inventing the Addict is a richly contextualized and elegantly nuanced cultural history of the concept of addiction. Susan Zieger shows how literary critical analysis offers particular insight not only into the power of language and narrative to shape public perceptions, but also into the complex social construction of ostensibly medical problems."--Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

"An important book for both Americanists and students of Victorian Britain, Inventing the Addict traces the historical development of the idea of addiction as a specific complication of the history of subjectivity in the nineteenth-century. Zieger organizes her study around the main metaphors for the developing concept of addiction and thereby brings the literary and non-literary works she analyzes into close alignment on a formal plane."--Catherine Gallagher, author of The Body Economic: Life, Death and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel

"A compelling and wide-ranging investigation into drugs, race, and sexuality as they are represented in nineteenth-century American writings. An important book for Americanists. . . . Demonstrates how the addict became slave-masters and drunkards. The merging of ideas and themes in both literacy and non-literary works offers powerful representations of the social and cultural experiences of the period, and excellent notes supplement this fascinating study."--The Year's Work in English Studies

"This book is filled with critical insights and buttressed by wide reading in primary and secondary sources."--Victorian Studies