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What, exactly, did tea, sugar, and opium mean in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain? Alimentary Orientalism examines the contentious debates surrounding these exotic, recently popularized, and literally consumable things. It suggests that the interwoven discourses that these commodities sparked transformed the period’s literary Orientalism and created surprisingly self-reflexive ways through which British writers encountered and imagined cultural otherness.
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
