Pleasures and pains : opium and the Orient in nineteenth-century British culture
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Pleasures and pains : opium and the Orient in nineteenth-century British culture
(Victorian literature and culture series)
University Press of Virginia, 1995
Available at 38 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p. [143]-151
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Throughout the 19th century, while Britons were taking their culture to the East, they were also bringing back exotic commodities and ideas, inviting the Orient to enter English terrain, bodies and consciousness. This mixing is both mediated and mirrored by opium, an Oriental commodity that enters and alters the English body and mindset, thus confusing the direction of Anglo-Oriental power dynamics. As Barry Milligan demonstrates in "Pleasures and Pains", this confusion occasions both anxiety and enjoyment in the literature of the century. Coleridge portrays Oriental commodities as an infection, but the consequent erosion of national, racial, gender and individual identity proves liberating as well as threatening. For Thomas De Quincy, opium becomes the axis of a conflict between two paradigms of national identity, suggesting that the Orient is both other and origin. In Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone", opium is a crucial factor in the power that putatively Oriental cultural elements have to seduce and dominate English consciousness and to insidiously intertwine themselves with English culture.
The final two chapters of "Pleasures and Pains" consider the ambivalent English responses to the influx of Oriental immigrants in the 1860s, when popular journalists and fiction writers began to portray London's East End opium dens as miniature Orients within the heart of the British Empire. Incorporating elements of literary criticism, cultural studies and social history, "Pleasures and Pains" examines the complicated dynamics of empire as well as the development of still prevalent perceptions of "drugs" as alien invaders responsible for the decay of national character.
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