What is a hangover? How does itfeel to suffer from one? What can hangovers tell us about the way attitudes toalcohol have developed over time? In the humanities, why have we neglected the subject of the hangover in ourcritical discussions of alcohol and intoxication?In the first comprehensive study of the hangover in literature and culture, JonathonShears sets out to answer each of these questions by exploring the representationof ‘the morning after’ in a wide variety of texts ranging from the Renaissanceto the present day. The book looks at what examples of ‘hangover literature’ fromwriters such as Ben Jonson, Robert Burns, Charles Dickens, Kingsley Amis and A.L. Kennedy can add to our personal and cultural understanding of alcohol use. Itdemonstrates that, more than just a cluster of physical symptoms, the hangoveris a complex interplay of sensations and emotions with a fascinating culturalhistory.
Jonathon Shears is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University. He edited the Byron Journal from 2012 to 2019 and his book Byron’s Temperament: Essays in Body and Mind won the Elma Dangerfield award in 2016. He is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron and working on projects related to alcohol and the emotions.
Introduction1. Isolating, Placing and Contextualising the Hangover2. 'The Nausea of Sin': The Early Modern Hangover3. 'Baneful to Public and to Private Good': Hours of Illness and Idleness in the Long Eighteenth Century4. Odes to Dejection: Romanticism and the Melancholy of Self-Knowledge5. Moral Sensitivity and the Mind: Tired and Emotional Victorians6. The Hangover and the Outsider: Self-Fashioning, Shame and Defiance in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Fiction
‘Reach for the blackest coffee you have (or a wee dram if you prefer): Shears takes us into the lost weekend of the literary hangover, unearthing the meanings of the pains and pleasures of the morning after the night before.’Andrew M. Butler
