Introduction : the varieties of intoxicated experience -- God's wine and devil's wine : the idea of intoxication in Emerson -- Little tippler's discerning eye : Dickinson and visionary drunkenness -- Beyond the sober eye of reason : Poe and the paradoxes of intoxication -- Gentleman's part : drinking and moral style in Cooper -- From conviviality to vision : intoxication in Hawthorne -- Too sober or too drunken : Melville's dialogics of drink -- Forbidden fruit : nineteenth-century American female authorship and the discourses of intoxication.