Introduction: The Shaken and the Stirred (Stephen Schneider and Craig N. Owens)
Part 1: Muddled Mythologies
1 ‘The greatest of all the contributions of the American way of life to the salvation of humanity’: On the Pre-History of the American Cocktail. (Jonathan Elmer)

2 The Boulevardier: Craft, Industrialism, and the Nostalgic Origin (Antonio Ceraso)
3 A Continued Stream of Fire: Professor Jerry Thomas invents the ‘Blue Blazer’ (Christoph Irmscher)

4 The Sazerac: Ritual, Parody, and New Orleans Cocktails (Joseph Turner)
5 My First Time (Albert W.A. Schmid)

Part 2: Spirits of the Age
6 ‘They made me feel civilized’: The Martini as Modernist Culture (Michael Coyle)
7 At Home with the Postwar Cocktail Party and the Cocktail Dress (Lori Hall-Araujo)
8 Middlebrow Cosmopolitanism and the Post-War Cocktail in Canada (Lisa Sumner)
9 Absolut Psychosis (Craig N. Owens)
10 Joy Perrine and the Bourbon Cocktail’s Renaissance (Susan Reigler)

Part 3: Mixed Messages
11 Inventing Margarita: Femininity, Fantasy, and Consumption (Marie Sarita Gaytán)
12 Polynesian Paralysis: Tiki Culture and American Colonialism (Andrew Pilsch)
13 The Irish Car Bomb (and One Other ‘Disreputable’ Cocktail) (Stephen Watt)
14 Bar Trek (William Biferie)
15 The Taming of the Shrub ( Dan Callaway)

Part 4: In A Glass, Darkly
16 The Lingering Louche: Absinthe, the Green Demon of Alternative Modernity (Aaron Jaffe)
17 A Rye Take on the Old Fashioned (Judith Roof)
18 Cocktails that aren’t Cocktails for Gentlemen who aren’t Men: Recovering the Metaphorical Body of the Fictional Drinker (Michael Lewis)

19 The Manhattan (Edward P. Comentale)
20 The Cold, Gray Dawn of the Morning After: Hangover Cures and the Inevitability of Excess (Stephen Schneider)

Afterword: Confessions of a Cocktail Nerd ( Sonja Kassebaum)
Contributors

Stephen Schneider is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville. He is the author of You Can’t Padlock an Idea.
Craig N. Owens is Professor of English at Drake University. He is the editor of Pinter Et Cetera.