Alimentary Orientalism: Britain's Literary Imagination and the Edible East (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781684484669)

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: Yin Yuan
ISBN-10: 1684484669
ISBN-13: 9781684484669
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/16/2023
Pages: 282
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.06w x 0.71d