This four-volume, reset collection takes as its starting point the earliest substantial descriptions of tea as a commodity in the mid-seventeenth century, and ends in the early nineteenth century with two key events: the discovery of tea plants in Assam in 1823, and the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly on the tea trade in 1833.

This four-volume, reset collection takes as its starting point the earliest substantial descriptions of tea as a commodity in the mid-seventeenth century, and ends in the early nineteenth century with two key events: the discovery of tea plants in Assam in 1823, and the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly on the tea trade in 1833.

This four-volume, reset collection takes as its starting point the earliest substantial descriptions of tea as a commodity in the mid-seventeenth century, and ends in the early nineteenth century with two key events: the discovery of tea plants in Assam in 1823, and the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly on the tea trade in 1833.

This four-volume, reset collection takes as its starting point the earliest substantial descriptions of tea as a commodity in the mid-seventeenth century, and ends in the early nineteenth century with two key events: the discovery of tea plants in Assam in 1823, and the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly on the tea trade in 1833.

In inviting a rethinking of ideas of foreignness and selfhood, this book explores Sino-British encounters in eighteenth-century English literature, providing detailed critical and literary analysis of individual texts pertaining to China from this period. The author provides a synthesis of approaches to China in eighteenth-century English literature, involving fictional writing related to China, adaptations of Chinese source texts, and translations of Chinese literary works. By discussing various writings about tea and tea-drinking, Arthur Murphy’s The Orphan of China (1759), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1760–62), and Thomas Percy’s Hau Kiou Choaan (1761), she highlights the significance of reading these texts not simply as documents of a historical kind, but as texts that are worthy of literary and artistic attention on the basis of their rich variety in genre, style, and themes. The author proposes that Chinese and British cultures are not antithetical entities: they exist in relation to one another and create possibilities in the continuing appreciation of diversity amidst a drive to universality. This study will be primarily helpful to university students and professors of English literature, comparative literature, and history worldwide.

When novels, plays and poems refer to food, they are often doing much more than we might think. Recent critical thinking suggests that depictions of food in literary works can help to explain the complex relationship between the body, subjectivity and social structures. A History of Food in Literature provides a clear and comprehensive overview of significant episodes of food and its consumption in major canonical literary works from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. This volume contextualises these works with reference to pertinent historical and cultural materials such as cookery books, diaries and guides to good health, in order to engage with the critical debate on food and literature and how ideas of food have developed over the centuries. Organised chronologically and examining certain key writers from every period, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, this book's enlightening critical analysis makes it relevant for anyone interested in the study of food and 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.

This book broadens the discussion of pottery and china in the Victorian era by situating them in the national, imperial, design reform, and domestic debates between 1840 and 1890. Largely ignored in recent scholarship, Ceramics in the Victorian Era: Meanings and Metaphors in Painting and Literature argues that the signification of a pot, a jug, or a tableware pattern can be more fully discerned in written and painted representations. Across five case studies, the book explores a rhetoric and set of conventions that developed within the representation of ceramics, emerging in the late-18th century, and continuing in the Victorian period. Each case study begins with a textual passage exemplifying the outlined theme and closes with an object analysis to demonstrate how the fusing of text, image, and object are critical to attaining the period eye in order to better understand the metaphorical meanings of ceramics. Essential reading not only for ceramics scholars, but also those of material culture, the book mines the rich and diverse archive of Victorian painting and literature, from the avant-garde to the sentimental, from the well-known to the more obscure, to shed light on the at once complex and simple implications of ceramics' agencies at this time.

Eliza Haywood was one of the most prolific English writers in the Age of the Enlightenment. Her career, from Love in Excess (1719) to her last completed project The Invisible Spy (1755) spanned the gamut of genres: novels, plays, advice manuals, periodicals, propaganda, satire, and translations. Haywood’s importance in the development of the novel is now well-known. A Spy on Eliza Haywood links this with her work in the other genres in which she published at least one volume a year throughout her life, demonstrating how she contributed substantially to making women’s writing a locus of debate that had to be taken seriously by contemporary readers, as well as now by current scholars of political, moral, and social enquiries into the eighteenth century. Haywood’s work is essential to the study of eighteenth-century literature and this collection of essays continues the growing scholarship on this most important of women writers.

This four-volume, reset collection takes as its starting point the earliest substantial descriptions of tea as a commodity in the mid-seventeenth century, and ends in the early nineteenth century with two key events: the discovery of tea plants in Assam in 1823, and the dissolution of the East India Company's monopoly on the tea trade in 1833.