The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey
By:
Sign Up Now!
Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title.
Learn about membership options,
or view our freely available titles.
- Synopsis
- InThe Language of the HeartTrysh Travis explores the rich cultural history of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and its offshoots and the larger "recovery movement" that has grown out of them. Moving from AA's beginnings in the mid-1930s as a men's fellowship that met in church basements to the thoroughly commercialized addiction treatment centers of today, Travis chronicles the development of recovery and examines its relationship to the broad American tradition of self-help, highlighting the roles that gender, mysticism, and print culture have played in that development. Travis draws on hitherto unexamined materials from AA's archives as well as a variety of popular recovery literatures. Her analysis traces AA's embrace of the concept of alcoholism as disease, the rise of feminist sobriety discourse and the codependence theories of the 1970s and 80s, and Oprah Winfrey's turn-of-the-millennium popularization of metaphysical healing. What unites these varied cultures of recovery, Travis argues, is their desire to offer spiritual solutions to problems of gender and power. Treating self-help seekers as individuals whose intellectual and aesthetic traditions are worth excavating,The Language of the Heartis the first book to attend to the evolution and variation found within the recovery movement and to treat recovery with the attention to detail that its complexity requires.
- Copyright:
- 2003
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9780807898703
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780807833193, 9781469604503, 9781469607306
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press, The
- Date of Addition:
- 01/05/16
- Copyrighted By:
- University of North Carolina Press, The
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Language Arts, Sociology
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.