Alimentary Orientalism

Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East

Yin Yuan (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

282 Seiten

2023
Bucknell University Press,U.S. (Verlag)
978-1-68448-467-6 (ISBN)

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What, exactly, did tea, sugar, and opium mean in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain? Alimentary Orientalism reassesses the politics of Orientalist representation by examining the contentious debates surrounding these exotic, recently popularized, and literally consumable things. It suggests that the interwoven discourses sparked by these commodities transformed the period’s literary Orientalism and created surprisingly self-reflexive ways through which British writers encountered and imagined cultural otherness. Tracing exotic ingestion as a motif across a range of authors and genres, this book considers how, why, and whither writers used scenes of eating, drinking, and smoking to diagnose and interrogate their own solipsistic constructions of the Orient. As national and cultural boundaries became increasingly porous, such self-reflexive inquiries into the nature and role of otherness provided an unexpected avenue for British imperial subjectivity to emerge and coalesce.

YIN YUAN is an assistant professor of English at Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga. Her research interests include British Orientalism, Anglophone literature, and East Asian popular culture and her work has been published in Studies in Romanticism, Keats-Shelley Journal, and SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.

Introduction: Exotic Ingestion and Self-Reflexive

Orientalism in Long-Eighteenth-Century Britain

1 Virtuous Leaf, “Intoxicating Liquor”:

England’s Tea Talk (A Prelude on Tea)

2 “Eating Only What I Knew”:

Exotic Consumerism and the Boundaries

of Selfhood in The Citizen of the World and Vathek

3 Cups, Cures, and Curses: The Elusiveness of

Cultural Identity in Lalla Rookh and

The Talisman

4 The Exotic Self: De Quincey’s Opium Texts

and Lamb’s Chinese Essays

5 “Barbarian Eye”: The Opium Wars as a

Visual Project (An Interlude on Opium)

6 “Not the Track of the Time”: Antiquated

Orientalismin Villette and Little Dorrit

Afterword: The Inadequate Language of Contagion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	16.09.2023
Zusatzinfo	2 bw, 1 color
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 235 mm
Gewicht	463 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10	1-68448-467-7 / 1684484677
ISBN-13	978-1-68448-467-6 / 9781684484676
Zustand	Neuware