This thesis examines Oscar Wilde, George Gissing and the challenges of aesthetic authorship in the literary marketplace of the 1890s. Using Pater’s formulation of the aesthetic as a basis for my understanding, I argue that the commodity-driven changes that transformed the literary marketplace at the end of the nineteenth century created insurmountable obstacles for authors working within the aesthetic ideal. I examine the conflict between the demands of the aesthetic and those of the literary market through two specific notions of ‘utility’. In the first instance, following Regenia Gagnier’s The Insatiability of Human Wants, I explore the seemingly opposed notions of economic utility and aesthetic authorship and how they appear to merge, with examples from the fictional prose of Wilde and Gissing. I then explore the public’s use of the aesthetic, which, I argue, is discernible in the celebrity-status of these authors; in particular, I focus on the growing need for authors to perform for their public—a need which signals a shift in the public’s consumption of art away from the literary work and towards the author himself. / As both forms of utility are essential aspects of literary production, yet also pose unaesthetic demands on the author, I examine how Wilde and Gissing respond to these challenges through their literary prose. Taking The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891] and New Grub Street [1891] in addition to Gissing’s The Whirlpool [1897] and Born In Exile [1892] and Wilde’s “The Remarkable Rocket” [1888] and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” [1891], alongside both authors’ letters and contributions to journals and magazines of the day, I reveal how their aesthetic idealism shapes their writing in an oppositional manner. Despite the overt differences between Wilde and Gissing, I also find striking similarities in their positioning as aesthetic authors in the late-Victorian literary field. By doing so, my thesis comprehensively examines how both authors mediate their aesthetic ideals in the literary marketplace of the 1890s.

Despite the popularity of Vietnamese cuisine in Toronto, there is limited understanding of how this culinary cuisine is socially constructed through its consumption and production. This thesis research examines the production of Toronto’s Vietnamese culinary landscape with the aim of unpacking the discursive power relations between consumers’ and purveyors’ construction of authenticity through the processes of racialization. It also highlights the identities created through racialized consumption and production practices, and how such identity constructions are constitutive of Vietnamese culinary culture. To this aim, consumers were surveyed and in-depth interviews were conducted with owners and managers. Results from the fieldwork process demonstrated that both consumers and producers construct authenticity and images of Vietnamese culture for their own benefits but had different, and sometimes confounding, understandings of how such constructions are interpreted and practiced. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2012-10-17 12:11:36.198

While William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is a satire, a humoristic account of the vanities of the different characters in the fictitious society of Vanity Fair, it is also a social criticism of early nineteenth century British society. The essay examines Thackeray’s social critique, which is sometimes explicitly expressed and sometimes more implicit. His criticism is aimed both at the new commodity culture where everything is reducible to money—even people and human relations—and at the class system of the up-and-coming middle classes and the established gentry and aristocracy. When Thackeray sends Becky Sharpe off in a vain pursuit of wealth and social status, he also uses her to expose the vanities of the other characters in Vanity Fair. Their vanities derive from the prevailing commodity culture and are mainly connected to wealth and social status. The essay discusses Becky’s progress from a sociological perspective through the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. His concepts of field, habitus, capital and distinction deal with the power structure in society and what distinguishes different social classes.  Here his theories are used to demonstrate how the different characters in Vanity Fair engage in competition for social status, by using their different forms of capital, and the essay emphasizes the convertibility of these kinds of capital. Bourdieu’s theories contribute to the understanding of how Becky who comes from nowhere, manages to climb to very top rung of the social ladder, but they also demonstrate that her chameleon-like ability to fit in everywhere is an exception to Bourdieu’s general model.

The omission of boredom from 1950s cultural and literary discourse is somewhat glaring, especially considering the frequency with which terms such as banality, conformity, and uniformity appear in scholarly and popular representations of the era. Such evocations of social and personal malaise derive from postwar sociological and theoretical critiques that rather uncritically dismiss mass culture as hostile to expressions of individuality. For Frankfurt school theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Henri Lefebvre, and Herbert Marcuse, the capitulation of individuals to a contented (and thoroughly dull) status quo is symptomatic of the disappearance of culturally distinct localities into a standardized national space, the parameters of which are determined by commodity culture. I argue that a closer inspection of filmic, literary, and archival texts from the era reveals the limitations of such macro geographies; texts often acknowledge such mass cultural rhetoric while at the same time offering a more nuanced and optimistic appraisal of the potential for meaningful engagement with the marketplace. Texts such as Norman Foster’s Woman on the Run, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” attribute postwar boredom to passive, diversionary consumption habits that mediate and inhibit the consumer’s ability to find fulfillment within local environments. By scrutinizing setting, characterization, narration, and other formal concerns within the context of boredom theory and Michael de Certeau’s spatial phenomenology, it becomes clear that these texts encourage a mode of spatial and cultural literacy capable of revealing opportunities for meaningful engagement within local environments that remain vital.

The early- to mid-twentieth century criticism surrounding E. E. Cummings often dismisses his poetry in Eliotic terms. In analyzing Cummings’s critics’ arguments and methodologies, I attempt to reveal the ways in which Cummings has been unfairly labelled, and also the strains in modernist criticism that have continued up through to today. I compare the modernist approaches to the text to the way recent critics talk about Cummings in order to shed light on our critical inheritance from modernism. Finally, I analyse Cummings’s poetry in terms of one of the more recent discussions of modernist texts, that of relationship between commodity and advertising culture and modernist poetry. My project seeks, by using Cummings as a case study, to articulate not only how certain literary values came to be established, but also how certain methods of persuasion in literary criticism can undermine and even silence certain aspects of a text.

My thesis examines the concept of sweetness as an aesthetic category in nineteenth-century British culture. My contention is that a link exists between the idea of sweetness as it appears in literary works and sugar as an everyday commodity with a complex history attached. Sugar had changed from being considered as a luxury in 1750 to a mass-market staple by the 1850s, a major cultural transition which altered the concept of sweetness as a taste. In the thesis I map the consequences of this shift as they are manifest in a range of texts from the period, alongside parallel changes in the aesthetic category of sweetness. I also assess the relationship between the material history of sweetness and the separate but related concept of aesthetic sweetness. In focussing on the relationship between sugar and sweetness in the Victorian period this thesis examines an area of nineteenth-century life that has previously never been subject to detailed study. Although several critics have explored the connection between sugar and concepts of sweetness as they relate to abolitionist debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my focus differs in that I assert that other material histories of sugar played as significant a role in developing discourses of sweetness. Throughout this study, which spans the period 1780-1870, I draw on a range of sources across a variety of genres, including abolitionist pamphlets, medical textbooks, the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Wilkie Collins, the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, and the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. I conclude that literary cultures in the nineteenth century increasingly use discourses of sugar to relate to the mass market and explore the commercialisation of literature, at a time when a growing commodity culture was seen as a threat to literary integrity.

Placing coffee at the centre of its analysis, this dissertation reveals the intersections between consumption, culture, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR)’s involvement in the developing world. State planners took steps to promote coffee as a good consumed not only for its value as a stimulant but also for enjoyment. Enjoying a warm cup of coffee represented East Germans’ participation in socialist society, and in a global coffee culture. Moreover, by adopting and weaving the older ideals and traditions associated with coffee into its messages of a bright socialist future based on modernity, progress and culture, the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) used coffee as part of its long-term goals of reforming society along socialist lines. When a major frost destroyed two thirds of Brazil’s coffee trees in July 1975, causing world prices to quadruple by 1977, GDR planners faced a genuine ‘Coffee Crisis’ that challenged the state’s political well-being. The regime replaced the most affordable brand ‘Kosta’ with ‘Kaffee-Mix,’ a blend of 51 per cent coffee and 49 per cent surrogate. Vehement public rejection of the replacement necessitated the hasty conclusion of new trade deals to solve the supply problem, deals which brought the GDR into contact with the developing world in ways it had not anticipated. This project considers four case studies – the GDR’s coffee deals with Angola, Ethiopia, Laos and Vietnam, and I argue that these coffee deals reveal as much about the GDR’s engagements with the global south as they do about its own self-image as a modern state in a divided, yet globalizing world. The GDR consciously approached these relationships as an industrially developed nation needing to ‘guide’ these newly independent states toward (a socialist) modernisation. Furthermore, these trade agreements reveal the balance between pragmatism and ideology which characterized the GDR’s pursuit of coffee; ideology often informed state representatives and framed the negotiations, but pragmatic concerns generally found primacy throughout the process. The GDR invested heavily in these developing countries’ coffee industries, sending technical equipment, along with agricultural and technical experts to help these countries meet East Germans’ import needs. In Angola and Ethiopia, the GDR provided weapons for coffee, while contracts with Laos and Vietnam led to lengthy development projects to ‘modernize’ each country’s coffee industry. This investment in turn helped change the balance of the world coffee trade; the most striking example of this process was the explosion of the Vietnamese coffee industry through the 1980s, which ultimately made Vietnam the world’s second largest producer of coffee next to Brazil. The need for coffee in the GDR, then, sparked a specific expansion of its involvement in the Global South, a process that complicates scholars’ positioning of the GDR within international relations. The example of coffee and the trade agreements it spurred suggests the need to move beyond questions about the degree to which the GDR could overcome its diplomatic isolation, or the extent of East German autonomy from the Soviets, toward questions about the nature of East Germany’s own foreign policy agenda, how it saw itself in the world, and how it contributed to the processes of globalization. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This investigation contributes to studies of post 1945-Europe and the Cold War by examining the culture, economics and politics surrounding the consumption of a single commodity in East Germany, coffee, from 1945-1989. Coffee was associated with many cultural virtues and traditions which became tied to the GDR’s official image of Socialism. When the regime’s ability to supply this good was jeopardized in 1975-77, the government sought out new sources of coffee in the developing, so-called ‘Third World.’ East Germany entered into long-term trade and development projects with countries like Angola, Ethiopia, Laos and Vietnam, to secure sufficient beans to supply its own population. These trade deals connected East Germany to a much broader, globalizing economy, and led to some lasting effects on the world coffee trade.

This study examines the functions of objects in a selection of British colonial travel accounts about Africa. The works discussed were published between 1863 and 1908 and include travelogues by John Hanning Speke, Verney Lovett Cameron, Henry Morton Stanley, Mary Henrietta Kingsley, Ewart Scott Grogan, Mary Hall and Constance Larymore. The author argues that objects are deeply involved in the construction of pre-modern and modern spheres that the travelling subject moves between. The objects in the travel accounts are studied in relation to a contextual background of Victorian commodity and object culture, epitomised by the 1851 Great Exhibition and the birth of the modern anthropological museum. The four analysis chapters investigate the roles of objects in ethnographical and geographical writing, in ideological discussions about the transformative powers of colonial trade, and in narratives about the arrival of the book in the colonial periphery. As the analysis shows, however, objects tend not to behave as they are expected to do. Instead of marking temporal differences, descriptions of objects are typically unstable and riddled with contradictions and foreground the ambivalence that characterises colonial literature.