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.
Author(s): Amy L. Tigner, Allison Carruth
Series: Literature and Contemporary Thought
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2017
Language: English
Tags: Literary Criticism, Food Studies, Literature
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
