Download or read book George Eliot and Intoxication written by K. McCormack and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1999-11-22 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout George Eliot's fiction, not only do a remarkable number of her characters act under the influence of unwise consumption of alcohol and opium, but drugs also recur often as metaphors and allusions. Together, they create an extensive pattern of drug/disease references that represent socio-political problems as diseases in a social body and solutions to those problems (especially solutions that depend on some kind of written language) as volatile remedies that retain the potential to either kill or cure.