Pleasures and Pains

Barry Milligan is Associate Professor of English at Wright State University and coeditor of Romantic Generations: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Gleckner.

This well-written and well-researched book shows that opium consumption as depicted in nineteenth-century English literature mirrors changing attitudes toward the Orient, the 'other' that both attracts and repels."-Choice"Milligan has a wonderful time smoking up social values, power, sexuality, and historiography in his analysis of opium trading, taking, and talking."-Lingua Franca