Kollegienhaus, lecture theatre 115
Organizer:
Prof. Dr Ina Habermann
Opium and Literature
This lecture explores Romantic and Victorian literature with a view to discourses on opium that serve, for instance, to bolster notions of literary inspiration, to inform literary criticism and to support Britain’s colonial enterprise. The opium trade elucidates capitalist atrocities in the context of colonial expansion and Empire building, culminating in two so-called Opium Wars. Cultivated in India, marketed by the East India Company, and forced onto a Chinese market to lubricate global trade, opium has become shorthand for colonial exploitation. In a domestic British context, however, opium was normalized as a quotidian drug employed to pacify children, to help people sleep or to alleviate pain. Taking my cue from these contexts, I will analyse literary examples ranging from classics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (1816) and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) to Maria Edgworth’s Belinda (1801), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Man With the Twisted Lip” (1891). The lecture will address discourses on opium in order to explore their manifold intersections with negotiations of race, gender and class, with debates on the function of literature, notions of creativity and inspiration, as well with strategies of economic and imperial expansion.
Export event as
iCal