Deborah Toner

... Deborah Toner ... Among the most eye-opening items under discussion, by Frances Pinter (Bloomsbury Academic) and Tessa Harvey (Wiley-Blackwell) in particular, was that traditional print publishing models are experiencing a rapidly escalating crisis of financial sustainability ...

This article examines the representation of provincial political culture and practices in selected fictional works of two prominent Mexican writers of the late nineteenth century: Emilio Rabasa and Heriberto Frías. Particular focus is given to Rabasa's portrait of a fictional pronunciamiento, a widespread form of political protest and negotiation in nineteenth-century Mexico that has recently been subject to historiographical re-evaluation, and Frías's exploration of the 1893 rebellion of Tomóchic. Rabasa's fiction supports the development of a political system that imposes the national will upon the unruly provinces by portraying the pronunciamiento as a destructive and chaotic practice, founded in the political ignorance of its participants. Frías's work, on the other hand, questions the validity of the national enterprise by framing the Tomóchic rebellion as the consequence of a national political system that had disengaged with local and regional voices.

This essay explores literary representations of drinking, drunkenness and alcoholism, and their relationship to issues of masculinity and national identity, in nineteenth-century Mexican fiction. I focus on the novels of Manuel Payno and Heriberto Frías, who used images of drinking to create contrasting male characters and to articulate their differing views on the meanings of manhood in nineteenth-century Mexico. Payno celebrated the values of fraternity and patriotism in Los bandidos de Río Frío (1888-91) in his heroic male prototype, Juan Robreño, who drinks in a moderate and socially appropriate manner, and condemned a macho-style pattern of heavy drinking, irresponsibility and violent behaviour through his portrait of Evaristo, a murderous worker and cruel bandit, in the same novel. In contrast, Frías created an alcoholic protagonist in his 1893 novel Tomóchic to challenge the validity of nationalist ideology centred on the values of fraternity and patriotism.

... The Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime, and Vice in Porfirian Mexico City – By James Alex Garza.DEBORAH TONER. Article first published online: 23 SEP 2009. ... More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: DEBORAH TONER. ...

This article examines the 19th-century resurrection of the legend of Xochitl in Mexico’s literary and visual imagery. Xochitl, the legendary discoverer of pulque (an indigenous alcoholic beverage) appeared in literary representations of pulquerías as a means of investing Mexican popular culture with historical and cultural authenticity. While many 19th-century representations of pulque and drinking mobilised references to the Greco-Roman god of wine, Bacchus, the costumbrista paintings of José Agustín Arrieta made oblique connections between Bacchus and Xochitl, and the costumbrista prose of Manuel Payno and Guillermo Prieto associated pulquerías more exclusively with ancient indigenous figures and with Xochitl in particular.

Drawing on an analysis of issues surrounding the consumption of alcohol in a diverse range of source materials, including novels, newspapers, medical texts, and archival records, this lively and engaging interdisciplinary study explores sociocultural nation-building processes in Mexico between 1810 and 1910. Examining the historical importance of drinking as both an important feature of Mexican social life and a persistent source of concern for Mexican intellectuals and politicians, Deborah Toner’s Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico offers surprising insights into how the nation was constructed and deconstructed in the nineteenth century.

Although Mexican intellectuals did indeed condemn the physically and morally debilitating aspects of excessive alcohol consumption and worried that particularly Mexican drinks and drinking places were preventing Mexico’s progress as a nation, they also identified more culturally valuable aspects of Mexican drinking cultures that ought to be celebrated as part of an “authentic” Mexican national culture. The intertwined literary and historical analysis in this study illustrates how wide-ranging the connections were between ideas about drinking, poverty, crime, insanity, citizenship, patriotism, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in the nineteenth century, and the book makes timely and important contributions to the fields of Latin American literature, alcohol studies, and the social and cultural history of nation-building.

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    Biographies of Drink

Picture of Biographies of Drink
Biographies of Drink
A Case Study Approach to our Historical Relationship with Alcohol
Editor(s): Mark Hailwood, Deborah Toner
Subject: History
Book Description

The burgeoning field of drinking studies, often ranging across and between disciplinary boundaries, explores the place of alcohol in human societies from a very diverse range of perspectives. Whilst some scholars have examined the cultural meanings and social practices associated with alcohol consumption, and its relationship to various forms of identity and community formation, others have focused on attempts to regulate or tax it, its role as a trade commodity, or its medical and psychological effects on consumers. The sheer diversity of issues upon which the study of alcohol and drinking can shed light is undoubtedly part of the strength of the field of drinking studies. At the same time, however, it can make it difficult for these different strands to consistently and fully engage with one another. This book offers an innovative methodology that will help to facilitate fruitful interactions between scholars approaching the study of alcohol from different perspectives: the “biographies of drink” approach. Drawing inspiration from, but also going beyond, work on the “social lives of things,” this collection of essays showcases an approach in which each author constructs a “biography” of a particular drink, drinking place, or idea associated with drink, in a tightly-focused historical context. The “biographies” included range from the drinking vessels of Roman Britain to a whisky advertising campaign in 1950s America, and deal with diverse themes, from the associations between alcohol and national identity to the relationship between drinking and Existentialism. The book brings together scholarly approaches from classics, design theory, literary studies and history within the “biographies” framework. This allows for the emergence of important areas of comparison and contrast, as well as several overarching themes, such as the close associations between different drinking patterns and notions of tradition and modernity that occur in a wide range of cultural and historical contexts. Not only, then, does this book provide fascinating case studies of interest to scholars working in particular fields or particular contexts, but it also showcases a productive new methodology which offers insights of relevance to anyone interested in the role of alcohol in any society.