Drunkard's progress : narratives of addiction, despair, and recovery / edited by John W. Crowley.
"Twelve-step" recovery programs for a wide variety of addictive behaviors have become tremendously popular in the 1990s. According to John W. Crowley, the origin of these movements--including Alcoholics Anonymous--lies in the Washingtonian Temperance Society, founded in Baltimore in the 18...
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| Online Access: |
Full Text (via Internet Archive) |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Baltimore, Md. :
Johns Hopkins University Press,
1999.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "Twelve-step" recovery programs for a wide variety of addictive behaviors have become tremendously popular in the 1990s. According to John W. Crowley, the origin of these movements--including Alcoholics Anonymous--lies in the Washingtonian Temperance Society, founded in Baltimore in the 1840s. In lectures, pamphlets, and books (most notably John B. Gough's Autobiography, published in 1845), recovering "drunkards" described their enslavement to and liberation from alcohol. Though widely circulated in their time, these influential temperance narratives have largely been forgotten. In Drunkard's Progress, Crowley presents a collection of revealing excerpts from these texts along with his own introductions. The tales, including "The Experience Meeting, " from T. S. Arthur's Six Nights with the Washingtonians (1842), and the autobiographical Narratives of Charles T. Woodman, A Reformed Inebriate (1843), still speak with surprising force to the miseries of drunkenness and the joys of deliverance. Contemporary readers familiar with twelve-step programs, Crowley notes, will feel a shock of recognition as they relate to the experience, strength, and hope of these old-time--but nonetheless timely--narratives of addiction, despair, and recovery. -- Back cover. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xiv, 202 pages : illustrations) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-202) |