The Drinking Curriculum

A Cultural History of Childhood and Alcohol

ELIZABETH A. MARSHALL

176 pages, 20 color and 22 b/w illustrations

9781531505240, Paperback, $25.00 (SDT), £21.99

9781531505233, Hardback, $90.00 (SDT), £81.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available

NOVEMBER

Children’s Studies | American Studies

“Elizabeth Marshall’s The Drinking Curriculum offers up a wildly intoxicating and brilliantly persuasive tour of our culture’s tales of childhood and boozing, innocence and loss. I know of no scholarly book that is at once so humorous, startling, and deeply important, ranging from comedy to angry denunciation, all presented to us in prose that rips into our minds—and hearts.”

—JAMES R. KINCAID, AUTHOR OF EROTIC INNOCENCE: THE CULTURE OF CHILD MOLESTING

“A compelling case study of precisely how our culture’s insistence on childhood purity obscures the violence that maintaining the veneer of innocence requires. The Drinking Curriculum offers an incredibly rich set of observations that ask us to think about our assumptions around maturity, sovereignty, purity, and innocence in provocative new ways.”

—ANNA MAE DUANE, EDITOR OF THE CHILDREN’S TABLE: CHILDHOOD STUDIES AND THE HUMANITIES

In The Drinking Curriculum, Elizabeth Marshall brings the taboo topic of alcohol and childhood into the limelight. Marshall coins the term “the drinking curriculum” to describe how a paradoxical set of cultural lessons about childhood are fueled by adult anxieties and preoccupations. By analyzing popular and widely accessible texts in visual culture—temperance tracts, cartoons, film, advertisements, and public-service announcements—Marshall demonstrates how youth are targets of mixed messages about intoxication. Those messages range from the overtly violent to the humorous, the moralistic to the profane. Offering a critical and, at times, irreverent analysis of dominant protectionist paradigms that sanctify childhood as implicitly innocent, The Drinking Curriculum centers the graphic narratives our culture uses to teach about alcohol, the roots of these pictorial tales in the nineteenth century, and the discursive hangover we nurse into the twenty-first.

ELIZABETH A. MARSHALL is an associate professor at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses on children’s literature, childhood, and popular culture. She is the author of Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence and co-author with Leigh Gilmore of Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (Fordham).