Alimentary Orientalism

Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East

Yin Yuan

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781684484669, 9781684484676
• eBook ISBN: 9781684484683
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Exotic Ingestion and Self-Reflexive Orientalism in Long-Eighteenth-Century Britain
• 1. Virtuous Leaf, “Intoxicating Liquor”: Britain’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 Orientalism in Villette and Little Dorrit
• Afterword: The Inadequate Language of Contagion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author