Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century aims to bring together detailed analyses of the cultural myths, or fictions, of consumption that have shaped discourses on consumer practices from the eighteenth century onwards. Individual essays provide an excitingly diverse range of perspectives, including musicology, philosophy, history, and art history, cultural and postcolonial studies as well as the study of literature in English, French, and German. The broad scope of this collection will engage audiences both inside and outside academia interested in the politics of food and consumption in eighteenth and nineteenth century culture.

Winner of the 2013 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association Winner of the 2013 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food, visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning. Combing through a visually stunning and rare archive of children’s literature, architectural history, domestic manuals, dietetic tracts, novels and advertising, Racial Indigestion tells the story of the consolidation of nationalist mythologies of whiteness via the erotic politics of consumption. Less a history of commodities than a history of eating itself, the book seeks to understand how eating became a political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race and class inequality and, finally, the queer pleasures and pitfalls of a burgeoning commodity culture. In so doing, Racial Indigestion sheds light on contemporary “foodie” culture’s vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism and race privilege. For more, visit the author's tumblr page: http://racialindigestion.tumblr.com

This collection provides a long-overdue examination of the nineteenth century as a crucible of new commemorative practices. Distinctive memory cultures emerged during this period which would fundamentally reshape public and private practices of remembrance in the modern world. The essays in this volume bring together scholars of History, Literature, Art History, and Musicology to explore uses of memory in nineteenth-century empire-building and constructions of national identity, cultures of sentiment and mourning practices, and discourses of race and power. Contributors approach the topic through case studies of Europe, the United States, and the British Empire. Their analyses of nineteenth-century innovations in commemoration at both the personal and the larger civic and political levels will appeal to students and scholars of memory and of the nineteenth-century world.

Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam explores how people in Vietnam used food and drink to strengthen their social position during the "long" nineteenth century, from the 1790s to the 1920s.

This volume provides engaging accounts with transmedia practices in the long nineteenth century and offers model analyses of Victorian media (e.g., theater, advertising, books, games, newspapers) alongside the technological, economic, and cultural conditions under which they emerged in the Anglophone world. By exploring engagement tactics and forms of audience participation, the book affords insight into the role that social agents – e.g., individual authors, publishing houses, theatre show producers, lithograph companies, toy manufacturers, newspaper syndicates, or advertisers – played in the production, distribution, and consumption of Victorian media. It considers such examples as Sherlock Holmes, Kewpie Dolls, media forms and practices such as cut-outs, popular lectures, telephone conversations or early theater broadcasting, and such authors as Nellie Bly, Mark Twain, and Walter Besant, offering insight into the variety of transmedia practices present in the long nineteenth century. The book brings together methods and theories from comics studies, communication and media studies, English and American studies, narratology and more, and proposes fresh ways to think about transmediality. Though the target audiences are students, teachers, and scholars in the humanities, the book will also resonate with non-academic readers interested in how media contents are produced, disseminated, and consumed, and with what implications.

Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the preponderance of food imagery in nineteenth-century literary texts. Contributors to this volume analyze the social, political, and cultural implications of scenes involving food and dining and illustrate how "aesthetic" notions of culinary preparation are often undercut by the actual practices of cooking and eating. As contributors interrogate the values and meanings behind culinary discourses, they complicate commonplace notions about American identity and question the power structure behind food production and consumption.

Women, fashion, consumption, luxury, and education are the main subjects of our researchers. The contributors of this volume accompanied women and objects in their travels across Modern Europe and offered thorough and diverse analyses connecting the circulation of people with the circulation of ideas. Making use of archive materials, visual sources and museum collections, the authors point out the richness of the region and the role of women in promoting new ideas of modernity. This will help the public to better know and understand the importance of women's sociability in building new nations and constructing new identities in South-Eastern Europe and beyond.

This book investigates the place and meaning of consumption in Jewish lives and the roles Jews played in different consumer cultures in modern Europe and North America. Drawing on innovative, original research into this new and challenging field, the volume brings Jewish studies and the history and theory of consumer culture into dialogue with each other. Its chapters explore Jewish businesspeople's development of niche commercial practices in several transnational contexts; the imagining, marketing, and realization of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine through consumer goods and strategies; associations between Jews, luxury, and gender in multiple contexts; and the political dimensions of consumer choice. Together the essays in this volume show how the study of consumption enriches our understanding of modern Jewish history and how a focus on consumer goods and practices illuminates the study of Jewish religious observance, ethnic identities, gender formations, and immigrant trajectories across the globe.

"This volume challenges those who see gender inequalities invariably defining and constraining the lives of women. But it also broadens the conversation about the degree to which business is a gender-blind institution, owned and managed by entrepreneurs whose gender identities shape and reflect economic and cultural change." – Mary A. Yeager, Professor Emerita, University of California, Los Angeles This is the first book to consider nineteenth-century businesswomen from a global perspective, moving beyond European and trans-Atlantic frameworks to include many other corners of the world. The women in these pages, who made money and business decisions for themselves rather than as employees, ran a wide variety of enterprises, from micro-businesses in the ‘grey market’ to large factories with international reach. They included publicans and farmers, midwives and property developers, milliners and plumbers, pirates and shopkeepers. Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective rejects the notion that nineteenth-century women were restricted to the home. Despite a variety of legal and structural restrictions, they found ways to make important but largely unrecognised contributions to economies around the world - many in business. Their impact on the economy and the economy’s impact on them challenge gender historians to think more about business and business historians to think more about gender and create a global history that is inclusive of multiple perspectives. Chapter one of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

To all thoughtful people World War I has brought to intention the importance of a knowledge of 19th Century European history. For without such knowledge no one can understand, or begin to understand, the significance of the forces that have made it, the vastness of the issues involved, the nature of what is indisputably one of the gravest crises in the history of mankind. No citizen of a free country who takes his citizenship seriously, who considers himself responsible, to the full extent of his personal influence, for the character and conduct of his government, can, without the crudest self-stultification, admit that he knows nothing and cares nothing about the history of Europe. Contents: The Old Regime in Europe The Old Regime in France Beginnings of the Revolution The Making of the Constitution The Legislative Assembly The Convention The Directory The Consulate The Early Years of the Empire The Empire at Its Height The Decline and Fall of Napoleon The Congresses France Under the Restoration Revolutions Beyond France The Reign of Louis Philippe Central Europe in Revolt The Second French Republic and the Founding of the Second Empire The Making of the Kingdom of Italy The Unification of Germany The Second Empire and the Franco-Prussian War The German Empire France Under the Third Republic The Kingdom of Italy Since 1870 Austria-Hungary Since 1848 England From 1815 to 1868 England Since 1868 The British Empire The Partition of Africa Spain and Portugal Holland and Belgium Since 1830 Switzerland The Scandinavian States The Disruption of the Ottoman Empire and the Rise of the Balkan States Russia to the War With Japan The Far East Russia Since the 1905 War With Japan The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 The European War Making the Peace