Join us Oct. 17 at 101 Archer at 7 p.m.!
OCH will host a book launch for Dayne Riley’s Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire. In anticipation of the launch, OCH conducted an exclusive interview with the author. Read about his reflections on the project below.
OCH
This book grew out of your dissertation. What surprises and challenges arose as you expanded your audience from a handful of professors to a much broader body of academics, scholars, and the public?
Riley
One of the main challenges I faced when developing this book was having to balance between a lot of different (often conflicting) suggestions and expectations.
When working on a dissertation, the group of people that you are working with is relatively small—just three people in my case. When I started developing this as a book project, I opened my work up to a lot of other perspectives. One area in which I noticed this diversity was the number of literary and historical examples suggested by outside readers. These readers pointed me to many texts I had not considered, but oftentimes these pieces of advice were a little contradictory from what I heard from others. I had to adapt and learn the middle path through different views on my work. At the same time as I was working to (re)read and add in this new evidence, my publisher was also asking me to trim down the word count of the monograph pretty substantially. To meet this goal, I had to cut many texts that, at the dissertation stage, seemed absolutely pivotal to proving my argument. It hurt, at points, pulling these proverbial teeth, but on the other side of publication, I see how important that lesson was.
OCH
What chapter was the most enjoyable to draft? Why?
Riley
My chapter on pipe tobacco was especially fun and rewarding to revisit. It was a chapter that I wrote much later in my dissertation journey, and at the time, I had this feeling that mulling over my ideas more fully would greatly improve the chapter. I remember knowing at the time that my discussion of Aphra Behn’s play The Widow Ranter, for example, was not quite where I wanted it. Much like the plant itself, my tobacco chapter certainly needed some room and time to grow. I was very happy to return to it, and it is certainly the chapter that changed most substantially from dissertation to book. I expanded my discussion of tobacco cultivation and trade, colonial behavior, and early responses to life in the Americas. I had more time to research colonial practices of tobacco pipe-making, which was fun to learn about. Furthermore, I was able to look more critically at racial associations with tobacco smoking, an area of inquiry I barely scratched the surface of when dissertating.
OCH
Were there any 17th or 18th century works were you unfamiliar with (or barely familiar with) when you began the project, but you loved by the end of it? If so, what made that or those work(s) so compelling to you?
Riley
The work that instantly comes to my mind would be John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which is the main play I will be discussing at the book launch. Prior to dissertating, I had read the play once—in my very first early British literature survey as an undergrad. The play is now a personal favorite of mine, and it is a real pleasure to teach. Gay references gin drinking throughout the play, but he is never consistent in his treatment of a beverage that was exploding in popularity (especially among the lower classes). That was starting to be a major sore spot for London society due to the prevalence of a new type of alcohol abuse. Gay’s varying treatment of gin was particularly frustrating to nail down while writing that section of the dissertation, and figuring out what Gay was up to continued to plague me even in the last stages of drafting the book. I like to think Gay (who died in 1732) had a great time somewhere, knowing how much trouble he was causing me (the late-night musings, the constant flip-flopping in my reading of the play, the continuous rewrites, etc.). Yes, John Gay would have found that quite funny, I think.
OCH
If readers had one major takeaway from your book, what would want it to be?
Riley
The main takeaway for any reader (be they a scholar, a student dipping their toe into the early modern era, or a just casual reader), I hope, would be to recognize more fully how different cultures and time periods perceive something as simple as the beer with their meal, the bottle of wine accenting the kitchen, or the slow puffs of a tobacco pipe. Recognizing that items, products, and the act of enjoying them have different meanings to different cultures, I think, helps us to be more observant of our own place in time. To look at a piece of literature and to realize that the person that wrote it would have viewed an object or act in both a profoundly different way but also in shockingly similar ways underscores why return to our favorite texts to begin with: great writing represents very clearly our shared experiences as people.
From the publisher:
Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – a period of vast economic change – recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls. This engaging and original study explores how literary satirists represented these consumables – and related anxieties about the changing nature of Britishness – in their work. Riley traces the satirical treatment of wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff from the beginning of Charles II’s reign, through the boom in tobacco’s popularity, to the end of the Gin Craze in libertine poems and plays, anonymous verse, ballad operas, and the satire of canonical writers such as Gay, Pope, and Swift. Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Consuming Anxieties examines how satirists championed Britain’s economic strength on the world stage while critiquing the effects of consumable luxuries on the British body and consciousness.
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