Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“Deborah Toner deftly combines the methodologies of history and literary criticism to show how drink was crucial to ideas about the nation in nineteenth-century Mexico. Informed by the findings of the anthropology of alcohol, this book offers important contributions to Mexican social, intellectual, and literary history.”—Jeffrey Pilcher, author of
Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food“Toner’s blending of literary analysis with medical and criminal reports presents a valuable approach to studies of nationalism, Mexico, and Latin America.”—James A. Garza, author of The Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime and Vice in Porfirian Mexico
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Alcohol, Literature, and Nation-Building
Part 1. Imagining the Nation through Alcohol, Class, and Gender
1. Everything in Its Right Place? Social Drinking Spaces, Popular Culture, and Nationhood
2. Patriotic Heroes and Consummate Drunks: Alcohol, Masculinity, and Nationhood
Part 2. Alcohol, Morality, and Medicine in the Story of National Development
3. Yankees, Toffs, and Miss Quixote: Drunken Bodies, Citizenship, and the Hope of Moral Reform
4. Medicine, Madness, and Modernity in Porfirian Mexico: Alcoholism as the National Disease
Conclusion: Drunkenness, Death, and Mexican Melancholia
Notes
Bibliography
Index
