The literature of food : an introduction from 1830 to present / Nicola Humble.

ISBN:

9780857854759

9781472521514

9781474205511

Title:

The literature of food : an introduction from 1830 to present / Nicola Humble.

Author:

Humble, Nicola, author.

Personal Author:

Humble, Nicola, author.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 283 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

Introduction: Food as Chimera - Strangeness and the Everyday -- 1. The Politics of Food: Hunger -- 2. The Difficult Dinner Party: Food as Performance in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Fiction -- 3. Kitchen Politics: The Coming and Going of the British Servant -- 4. Gender: Cooks, Chefs, Bon Viveurs and Domestic Goddesses -- 5. Modernist Food / Modern Food: Literary and Culinary Experiments in the Early Twentieth Century -- 6. Fantasies of Food in Children's Literature -- 7. Reading Recipes -- 8. Down the Alimentary Canal: Food, Digestion and Disgust -- Conclusion: Go to Work on an Egg.

Subject Term:

Food in literature.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2020

Publication Information:

London :

Bloomsbury Publishing,

2020.

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
810.93564 23	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Why are so many literary texts preoccupied with food? The Literature of Food explores this question by looking at the continually shifting relationship between two sorts of foods: the real and the imagined. It is the first systematic study of the literature of food from the 19th century to the present, covering a wide range of issues including the politics of food, food as performance, and its intersections with gender, class, disgust and erotics. Combining the insights of food studies and literary analysis, the author demonstrates how the reading of food within texts can illuminate our reading of food outside them. Carefully designed and structured for use on the growing number of literature of food courses, it considers the food of modernism, post-modernism, crime fiction, the realist novel and children's literature, and asks what happens when we treat cook books as literary texts.From secret snacks to the changing role of the servant, experimental cook books to the cannibalistic fears in infant picture books, The Literature of Food demonstrates that food is always richer and stranger than we think.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

This book's title implies a work more straightforward than it actually is. What Humble (English, Univ. of Roehampton, UK) offers is an extremely complex and interesting study of "the literature of food," at treatment that covers food in literature and food writing as literature. Humble takes a multidisciplinary approach to her subject, examining a variety of works (novels, essays, poetry, memoirs, cookbooks, and so on) and exploring specific themes that connect her selected texts. In the book's eight chapters she takes up hunger in literary works of the 19th- and early-20th century; entertaining and food in the same period; the British servant; gender; modernism; food in children's literature; recipes as literature; and disgust and food. Focusing mostly on British and American literature, this is a thought-provoking and insightful work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Skye Hardesty, Georgia State University