Alimentary Orientalism

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