Title:
Consuming India : the influence of nineteenth-century fiction on British consumer culture
Creator:
Wielusiewicz, David Alexander
Date Created:
2013
Degree Awarded:
Master of Arts
Subjects:
United Kingdom India
Geographical Focus:
India Britain
Supporting Materials:
n/a
Description:
This thesis constructs a cultural biography of tobacco and opium, driven by their representations in six nineteenth-century fictions of India, in order to examine how the British consumption of these imperial commodities changed in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857. By engaging with novels by William Browne Hockley, William Delafield Arnold, Meadows Taylor, James Grant, and Wilkie Collins, a wide-range of metropolitan and Anglo-Indian perspectives will provide a sense of the diverse ways that India was represented to, and understood by British audiences in the nineteenth century. Representations of tobacco and opium in these novels shifted from playing a weaker, metonymic role in the narrative to becoming heavily charged metaphors that associated these imperial commodities with “mutiny,” influencing modern British consumer culture in the last half of the nineteenth century.
Source
Preferred Citation:
Wielusiewicz, David Alexander. 2013. "Consuming India : the influence of nineteenth-century fiction on British consumer culture", Department of History, Carleton University
Link to this page:
https://cuhistory.github.io/grads/items/hist_86.html
Rights
Rights:
Copyright the author, all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.