Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Victorian Literature & Culture)

At once a lucrative commodity of Britain's 19th century empire in the East and disturbingly corrosive of her national and cultural identity, opium provided British writers with a focus for representing the anxieties and exhilarations of Otherness. Milligan examines this turmoil in the work of British writers from Coleridge and De Quincey to Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.