Reading Alcoholisms: Theorizing Character and Narrative in Selected Novels of Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf [Hardcover]

Jane Lilienfeld (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 16, 1999

With Reading Alcoholisms, Jane Lilienfeld has produced a ground-breaking cross-disciplinary study using the social, psychological, and scientific literature on alcoholism and family alcoholism to examine the novels of Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf. Each of these authors was directly affected by the alcoholism of a family member or mentor, and Lilienfeld shows how the effects of alcoholism organized their texts: through the portrayal of a protagonist in The Mayor of Casterbridge, through the denial of parental alcoholism and its silent presence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and through codependent reactive patterns of Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. With the remarkable empathy Lilienfeld has for human dimensions of alcoholism, she demonstrates that "the narrative strategies in each of these novels at times mimic the behaviors and feeling states often arising from alcoholism." Without an understanding of the multidimensional nature of alcoholism and the transmission of its effects across generations, any analysis of the work of these three literary giants is incomplete.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In three essays, Lilienfeld (English, Lincoln Univ.) uses the techniques of literary criticism and the sociology of addiction to study three modern writers. Thomas Hardy was raised in a hard-drinking rural culture and wrote explicitly about it in The Mayor of Casterbridge. In James Joyce's semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Joyce's alcoholic father, John Joyce, who drank away the family's fortunes, appears as Simon Dedalus. Lilienfeld postulates that the Joyce family's strategies for dealing with John Joyce, which were similar to those of other alcoholics' families, are responsible for the famously elliptical plot of Portrait. However, she does not deal with James Joyce's own alcoholism. The weakest of the essays covers Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; the only addiction seems to be Woolf's grandmother's possible addiction to morphine and the codependent personality it created in Woolf's mother. All of the essays require close familiarity with both the critical literature of the author and the literature of addiction and codependence. For specialized collections.AShelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

If alcoholism theory is not yet considered an accepted discourse in literary scholarship, it may well become one after this book.... Harvard Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1st edition (July 16, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312217099
• ISBN-13: 978-0312217099
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #936,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An important book from a number of angles., August 12, 1999

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This review is from: Reading Alcoholisms: Theorizing Character and Narrative in Selected Novels of Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf (Hardcover)

What Shays did for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in *Achilles in Vietnam,* Dr. Jane Lilienfeld does for alcoholism in her new book, *Reading Alcoholisms.* Lilienfeld's book reviews some familiar works of English literature dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries through the lens of what we have come to know about alcoholism, both the "disease process" itself and its somewhat predictable effects upon alcoholics, their families, and others close to them. At the time the works Lilienfeld focuses upon were written, there was no body of alcoholism theory; nevertheless, the authors of these works reproduced in painful detail what would later become familiar trajectories of personal and familial decline. One of the points Lilienfeld scores is to show that alcoholism as we understand it existed BEFORE we understood it. However crude and ineffective present treatments for them might be, alcoholism (and, by extension, other addictions) are hardly the iatrogenic diseases some occasionally claim. Lilienfeld allows her readers to think inductively about evidence in the texts. One might sometimes wish for her to validate our thinking by drawing more conclusions for us. But that's a small gripe. This is a fine book.