The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food

Description

This Companion provides an engaging and expansive overview of gustation, gastronomy, agriculture and alimentary activism in literature from the medieval period to the present day, as well as an illuminating introduction to cookbooks as literature. Bringing together sixteen original essays by leading scholars, the collection rethinks literary food from a variety of critical angles, including gender and sexuality, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, eco-criticism and children's literature. Topics covered include mealtime decorum in Chaucer, Milton's culinary metaphors, early American taste, Romantic gastronomy, Victorian eating, African-American women's culinary writing, modernist food experiments, Julia Child and cold war cooking, industrialized food in children's literature, agricultural horror and farmworker activism, queer cookbooks, hunger as protest and postcolonial legacy, and 'dude food' in contemporary food blogs. Featuring a chronology of key publication and historical dates and a comprehensive bibliography of further reading, this Companion is an indispensible guide to an exciting field for students and instructors.

J. Michelle Coghlan is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of Sensational Internationalism: the Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century (2016), which won the 2017 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize in American Studies. Her articles have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, the Henry James Review, and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, and several edited collections, including Gitanjali G. Shahani's Literature and Food (Cambridge, 2018). She is currently completing a book on food writing and the making of American taste in the nineteenth century.

'The book is clearly written and full of engaging facts and literary connections.' M. K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Choice