Table of Contents:
  • Cover
  • Half-Title
  • Series Editors
  • Title Page
  • Copyright
  • Contents
  • Series Editors' Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Getting to Know the Inter-Imperial "Lineages" of Domestic Commodities in US Fiction, 1865-1930
  • Methodology: Nation, Gender, Race, and Taste in Inter-Imperial Commodities
  • "Geography in a Cup of Coffee": Nineteenth-Century Commodity Lessons
  • Overview of Chapters
  • 1. Cotton, Carmine, Coal, and Flour: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Consumption in Alcott and Phelps
  • Jo's Imperial-Inspired "Prosing Away" in Little Women
  • Avoiding "Oppressive but Extremely Distant Facts" in The Story of Avis
  • Confronting Avis's Orientalist Gaze
  • The "Inarticulate Passion" of Cochineal Beetles and Carmine Dye
  • Conquering Florida's Oranges with a "Little Northern Pluck"
  • 2. Maneuvering through Centuries of Inter-Imperial Fur Trading and Gold Speculation in Woolson and Ruiz de Burton
  • Fur Trade Nostalgia in Anne
  • Manipulating the Anglo-Saxon Goddess
  • Anne's Consolidation of Power
  • "A Great Acquisition" in Who Would Have Thought It?
  • Imperial Extraction of New World Gold, Fifteenth Century-Nineteenth Century
  • Layers of History in Lola's Shifting Skin Color
  • 3. Bouguereau is Best: Disentangling Economic and Aesthetic Values in Norris and Du Bois
  • Global Wheat and Cotton Dramas
  • Bouguereau as Cultural, Economic, and Political Capital
  • Artistic Intrigues
  • Concluding Studies in Contrast
  • 4. Orientalist Consumption of Pearls and Blue Chinese Porcelain in Wharton and Larsen
  • Violent Desires for Pearls in The Custom of the Country
  • The "Real Thing" and the Copy
  • Undine's Royal Pearls and Global Vision of Conquest
  • Shuttling Toward Orientalist "Things" in Larsen's Quicksand
  • The Inter-Imperial Hybridity of "Blue Chinese" Porcelain
  • Weaving an Integrated Selfhood
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • Index