Food in the Novels of Thomas Hardy : Production and Consumption

Description

This book examines the role of food in the life and works of Thomas Hardy, analysing the social, political and historical context of references to meals, eating and food production during the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how Hardy’s personal relationship to the ‘rustic’ food of his childhood provides the impetus for his fiction, and provides a historical breakdown of the key factors which influenced food regulation and production from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the fin de siècle. This study explores how a sub-textual narrative of food references in The Trumpet-Major and Under the Greenwood Tree captures the instability of the pre-industrial era, and how food and eating act as a means of delineating and exploring ‘character’ and ‘environment’ in The Mayor of Casterbridge. As well as this, it considers rural femininity and the myth of the feminine pastoral in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and charts the anxieties brought about by the shift in population from a rural to a predominantly urban one and its impact on food production in Jude the Obscure. Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii Introduction (Kim Salmons)....Pages 1-12 Historical Context (Kim Salmons)....Pages 13-36 Undermining the ‘Pastoral Idyll’: The Trumpet-Major and Under the Greenwood Tree (Kim Salmons)....Pages 37-64 The Decline and Fall of the Corn King: The Mayor of Casterbridge (Kim Salmons)....Pages 65-83 Food Production and the Feminine Pastoral: Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Kim Salmons)....Pages 85-103 Pig Killing and Surviving Modernity: Jude the Obscure (Kim Salmons)....Pages 105-119 Conclusion (Kim Salmons)....Pages 121-124 Back Matter ....Pages 125-133