Description
Book SynopsisNicola Humble is Professor of English at the University of Roehampton, UK.
Trade ReviewA convivial, thoughtful, and humane contribution to the varieties of literary experience that food has generated. * World of Fine Wine *
This introduction to “the literature of food” will appeal to scholars and students alike. With her characteristic wit and lucidity, Humble tackles themes like hunger and disgust, genres like children’s literature and food memoirs, and dynamics like class tensions and gender roles. An ample repast for the eager reader. * Associate Professor at University of South Carolina, USA *
This is a thrilling, compendious study of English literature and its handling of the vibrant stuff of food. Its tone is consistent from beginning to end: friendly, authoritative, interested and interesting. Nicola Humble is a superb guide to a literary tradition that goes far beyond metaphor in treating food as the stuff of nightmares, hatred, violence and, above all, love. * Andrew Warnes, University of Leeds, UK and author of How Shopping Carts Explain Global Consumerism (2018) *
Conveys the magnitude of this fascinating subject while brilliantly performing its stated task as an “introduction” to food in literature with a thorough, compelling analysis of the select corpus and themes. * English Studies *
Table of ContentsList of images Permissions details Acknowledgements 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 Bibliography Notes
