ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the subject of the hangover as represented in a variety of fiction and poetry from British and American writers of the twentieth century and extends briefly into the twenty-first. It argues that the hangover is a culturally produced phenomenon rather than a purely physiological response to the consumption of alcohol and that literature demonstrates the ways in which hungover individuals negotiate the social and moral judgements attached to alcohol use. Hangover is a term that first enters common usage in the early twentieth century. It means both the after-effects of drinking and, more generally, something or someone left over from an earlier time. As such, it signifies the physiological leftovers of intoxication and an individual’s response to the events of their immediate and potentially longer past. The chapter argues that hangover literature suggests a transition to modernity that can’t quite shake off the values of an earlier age. It demonstrates the cultural myths of the hangover that dog heavy drinkers and from which they struggle to set themselves free in works by writers such as Jack London, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Elizabeth Bishop, Helen Fielding and A. L. Kennedy.