Cocaine, Literature, and Culture, 1876-1930

"The first significant study of cocaine in the literary and cultural imagination of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, this open access book offers an important exploration of the drug's symbolic and metaphorical associations in the decades prior to its criminalization. Reading texts such as the Sherlock Holmes stories, by Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as work by Arthur Machen, W.C Morrow and Aleister Crowley, it examines the paradoxical position of cocaine in this period"--