2011 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

Representation of "Tea" and "Women" in the Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Research Project

Project/Area Number	21652028
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	Literature in English
Research Institution	Teikyo University
Principal Investigator	ONO Masako 帝京大学, 外国語学部, 教授 (80233229)
Project Period (FY)	2009 – 2011
Keywords	英文学 / 18世紀 / 紅茶 / 女性 / 贅沢 / 消費社会 / 物質文化 / 階級
Research Abstract	Expensive tea and luxury tea equipage, brought to England by the East Indian Company first in the late seventeenth century, became the passion for the rich who tried to mark their polite status by a set of material attributes. Literary texts, however, present women as more likely to be seduced by such luxury. The male imagination associates the female appetite for things with that for sex. Through the misogynic discourse "tea" becomes a fit metaphor for the female voracity.

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