This project examines food and literature in the construction and consumption of British imperial identity. Focusing on the subtle shifts in the rhetoric of both literature and legislation between the years 1773 and 1939 (from the Regulating Act of 1773, which curbed the East India Company's rule of India and initiated government involvement, to the Independence of Ireland and World War II), I investigate how food and the novel work to consolidate and sustain what Benedict Anderson has termed an imagined community, a heterogeneous, composite identity strategically constituted against elastic definitions of Otherness, whether of race, class, gender, or geography. The first part of this project examines what effect the repeal of the Corn Laws had upon the creation of a mythologized past and competing versions of Englishness as illustrated in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and Disraeli's Sybil. I then look at the 'intoxicating ingestion' of Otherness, particularly as regards the figure of India/the Indian, depictions of which shift from seductive siren in Owenson's The Missionary to inane simpleton in Thackeray's Vanity Fair to sinister, if misunderstood, alien in Collins' The Moonstone. From the demonization of the Indian, I examine the 'monsterization' of the Irishman in a series of texts, such as Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, arguing that Otherness is signified through not only racialization of the colonized, but also what---or even whom---one eats. Finally, the second part of this project looks at how nationalism is internally defined in terms of class and gender. While the novels of Dickens and Trollope reveal the presence of occluded class lines rendered visible and negotiable through the dining habits of the 'ordinary' gentleman, generic disruptions in the novels of Gaskell, Bronte, and Braddon betray uneasiness regarding the location of not only woman and her often ungovernable appetites, but also women's writing in the reproduction of national identity. I conclude by suggesting that the implications of my analyses are not restricted to nineteenth-century Britain, but are still relevant to contemporary imaginings and contestations of national identity / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_26499 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Contributors | Cozzi, Annette (Author), Travis, Molly (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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