Description
Book SynopsisGruel and truffles, wine and gin, opium and cocaine.
Making a Man addresses consumption of food, drink, and drugs in the conspicuously consuming nineteenth century in order to explore the question of what, in fact, makes a man in novels of the period.
Trade Review"The contributions to nineteenth-century cultural studies, food studies, and studies in the novel are striking and significant. The readings of wine and food are superb... The linkage the author draws between aliment and the identity of the gentleman is groundbreaking." -- Donald E. Hall, Literary and Cultural Theory "Gwen Hyman's Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel is a subtle and persuasive account of the nineteenth-century novel's reliance on shifting relations between 'the alimental gentleman' and what that gentleman eats and drinks... (A) significant and engaging book." -- Victorian Studies "...with much wit and an alertness to how novels work, Making a Man cleverly fleshes out the complications of gentlemanly identity in the nineteenth-century novel." -- Gastronomica "In addition to offering clues to the problematic identity of the Victorian gentleman, Hyman documents convincingly how eating metaphors gave shape to epistemic worries about class, money and status." -- Dickens Quarterly "(I)n beguiling single-book readings of novels by writers from Austen to Bram Stoker, Hyman discusses abstemiousness, drunkenness, technologies of food preparation and storage, conspicuous consumption, drug addiction, and blood sucking." -- Studies in English Literature 1500--1900 "(Hyman's) book should enjoy a long, useful shelf life." -- English Literature in Transition 1880--1920
