Search results for ""author robert appelbaum""

Working the Aisles takes the reader on tumultuous driving trips across the United States and France, on phone sex escapades in San Francisco, on banking battles in Sweden, and many other adventures - including, of course, on trips to supermarkets, where the author has had to 'work the aisles'. Moving back and forth through time, like a novelist, indeed in something of a memoirist tour de force, the book develops the story of struggle, of poverty and depression, but also of gaiety and desire, of a will to live in spite of it all, and to keep working the aisles. It moves the reader through highs and lows, through episodes of ecstasy and thoughts about suicide, and tells how this particular Everyman ended up sane but sorry.

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We didn't always eat the way we do today, or think and feel about eating as we now do. But we can trace the roots of our own eating culture back to the culinary world of early modern Europe, which invented cutlery, haute cuisine, the weight-loss diet, and much else besides. "Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup" tells the story of how early modern Europeans put food into words and words into food, and created an experience all their own. Named after characters in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night", this lively study draws on sources ranging from cookbooks to comic novels, and examines both the highest ideals of culinary culture and its most grotesque, ridiculous, and pathetic expressions. Robert Appelbaum paints a vivid picture of a world in which food was many things - from a symbol of prestige and sociability to a cause for religious and economic struggle - but always represented the primacy of materiality in life. Peppered with illustrations and a handful of recipes, "Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup" will appeal to anyone interested in early modern literature or the history of food.

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Envisioning an English Empire brings together leading historians and literary scholars to reframe our understanding of the history of Jamestown and the literature of empire that emerged from it. The founding of an English colony at Jamestown in 1607 was no isolated incident. It was one event among many in the long development of the North Atlantic world. Ireland, Spain, Morocco, West Africa, Turkey, and the Native federations of North America all played a role alongside the Virginia Company in London and English settlers on the ground. English proponents of empire responded as much to fears of Spanish ambitions, fantasies about discovering gold, and dreams of easily dominating the region's Natives as they did to the grim lessons of earlier, failed outposts in North America. Developments in trade and technology, in diplomatic relations and ideology, in agricultural practices and property relations were as crucial as the self-consciously combative adventurers who initially set sail for the Chesapeake. The collection begins by exploring the initial encounters between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan Indians and the relations of both these groups with London. It goes on to examine the international context that defined English colonialism in this period—relations with Spain, the Turks, North Africa, and Ireland. Finally, it turns to the ways both settlers and Natives were transformed over the course of the seventeenth century, considering conflicts and exchanges over food, property, slavery, and colonial identity. What results is a multifaceted view of the history of Jamestown up to the time of Bacon's Rebellion and its aftermath. The writings of Captain John Smith, the experience of Powhatans in London, the letters home of a disappointed indentured servant, the Moroccans, Turks, and Indians of the English stage, the ethnographic texts of early explorers, and many other phenomena all come into focus as examples of the envisioning of a nascent empire and the Atlantic world in which it found a hold.

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