Literature and Food Studies

Description

Literature and Food Studies introduces readers to a growing interdisciplinary field by examining literary genres and cultural movements as they engage with the edible world and, in turn, illuminate transnational histories of empire, domesticity, scientific innovation, and environmental transformation and degradation. With a focus on the Americas and Europe, Literature and Food Studies compares works of imaginative literature, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, with what the authors define as vernacular literary practices—which take written form as horticultural manuals, recipes, cookbooks, restaurant reviews, agricultural manifestos, dietary treatises, and culinary guides. For those new to its principal subject, Literature and Food Studies introduces core concepts in food studies that span anthropology, geography, history, literature, and other fields; it compares canonical literary texts with popular forms of print culture; and it aims to inspire future research and teaching. Combining a cultural studies approach to foodways and food systems with textual analysis and archival research, the book offers an engaging and lucid introduction for humanities scholars and students to the rapidly expanding field of food studies. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures Series editors’ preface Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Genealogies and genres of food studies Works cited 2 Food routes: Seasonality, abundance, and the mythic garden Mythic origins of seasonal food A literary reversal of seasons and the return to paradise Herbals and kitchen practices Eternal summer in paradise Unseasonal eating and the colonial imagination Notes Works cited 3 Virtuous eating: Utopian farms and dietary treatises Epicurean virtue and the conviviality of a commonwealth: Sir Thomas More’s Utopia Failed utopianism: Louisa May Alcott’s satire of the Fruitlands farm Benjamin Franklin’s lapsed vegetarianism Dietary virtue and literary virtuosity: Percy Shelley’s vegetarian pamphlets From virtuous eating to food justice Notes Works cited 4 Recipes as vernacular literature: A case study in chocolate The receipt books of early modern Europe Cocao trade and liquid chocolate, from Aztec royalty to Spanish conquistadors The medicinal versus decadent meanings of chocolate Chocolate recipes in the British empire Culinary experimentation and chocolate as a solid food Coda: industrial chocolate and food justice Notes Works cited 5 Gustatory narrative: Meals, memory, and modernist fiction Introduction: Meals and memory in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu The gustatory narrative of Bloom’s meals in Ulysses The dinner party in To the Lighthouse A Book of Salt as a diasporic response to modernist gourmandise Notes Works cited 6 Authoring gastronomy: Professional eaters and culinary print culture Discipline and pleasure: the long history of gastronomy The fine art of dining in post-Revolutionary France Elite eaters: the authors of French gastronomy Gastronomy’s gender troubles Counter-gastronomy and culinary satire Notes Works cited Epilogue Works cited Index