Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East

Yin Yuan

Published by Bucknell University Press 2023

Alimentary Orientalism

Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East

Yin Yuan

In the series Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850

https://doi.org/10.36019/9781684484690

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

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.

Reviews

"Focusing on early British Orientalism as a distinctly literary effort to negotiate the new material realities of imperial commerce, Alimentary Orientalism locates in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing about exotic comestibles an emergent form of semiotic theory. Imperial self-making, it shows, not only rehearsed mythologies of encounter, but did so as a way of orienting British selfhood in the liminal space where sign meets substance—the space where empire unfolds."— Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism

“The analysis is convincing, grounded in close reading and always in dialogue with other scholars . . . a book of definite interest to those who care about Asia and Asian people and who recognize Orientalism, in its pernicious form, as a concern of the present.”— Asian Review of Books

“Eating, drinking, smoking—the bodies in nineteenth-century British writing took in Chinese influence both cavalierly and copiously. Yin Yuan’s book helps us understand this consumption by explaining, with erudition and grace, how such exotic ingestants navigated Britain’s symbolic and material Oriental encounters on their way to the heart of the empire.”— Elizabeth Hope Chang, author of Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain

"A bold and powerfully generative take on the literary shockwaves produced by the massive influx—at once unsettling and inspiring—of Eastern products in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. By centering eating and drinking as the paradigmatic forms of exotic consumption, Yin Yuan surfaces previously unrecognized currents of ironic self-reflexivity with respect to bodily and cultural boundaries set in motion by the period’s insatiable appetites for the Orient. Rarely has such a theoretically astute treatment of the cultural politics of eating made for such devilishly delicious fare."— David Porter, author of The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England

"Bracingly original, Alimentary Orientalism moves beyond predictable ‘self/other’ binaries to delineate new complexities in British ‘Orientalist’ literary discourse. Focusing on such ‘psychoactive groceries’ as tea and opium, Yuan details how various texts represent the literal incorporation of otherness, even as they self-critically investigate the nature of Orientalist representation itself."— Alan Richardson, author of The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: Exotic Ingestion and Self-Reflexive Orientalism in Long-Eighteenth- Century Britain Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Virtuous Leaf, “Intoxicating Liquor”: Britain’s Tea Talk (A Prelude on Tea) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2 “Eating Only What I Knew”: Exotic Consumerism and the Boundaries of Selfhood in The Citizen of the World and Vathek Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	36
3 Cups, Cures, and Curses: The Elusiveness of Cultural Identity in Lalla Rookh and The Talisman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
4 The Exotic Self: De Quincey’s Opium Texts and Lamb’s Chinese Essays Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	98
5 “Barbarian Eye”: The Opium Wars as a Visual Project (An Interlude on Opium) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
6 “Not the Track of the Time”: Antiquated Orientalism in Villette and Little Dorrit Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146
Afterword: The Inadequate Language of Contagion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	186
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	271