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Books & Bagels
October 15, 8:30 am-9:30 am
FreeDayne C. Riley, Ph.D., explores bad habits and satire at the Books & Bagels Series in McFarlin Library! Riley’s first book examines how Aphra Behn, John Gay, Jonathan Swift and others depicted consumable items like wine, gin, and tobacco in their literary satire. Bagels and coffee will be served.
More about CONSUMING ANXIETIES
Dayne C. Riley’s first book, Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751, examines plays, anonymous verse, and the work of canonical writers from, such as Aphra Behn, John Gay, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. The book explores how literary satirists represented consumables items—including wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff—in their work. Riley argues that British satirists imbued their representations of alcohol and tobacco products with meanings that their contemporary audience would have understood but that tend to be invisible to modern readers.
Riley’s book examines how satirical writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—grappled with the problem of heavy alcohol and tobacco consumption in England. While alcohol and tobacco generated a great deal of revenue for Britain, these products inevitably led many of its citizens into spiritual, moral, and even financial bankruptcy. Satirists of the long eighteenth century had then to contend with the problem of consumer products that led to national economic expansion, as well as to deep moral pitfalls.
Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Riley’s 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. The book was published June 2024 by Bucknell University Press.