Cultures Of Taste Theories Of Appetite Eating Romanticism

Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite brings two major critical impulses within the field of Romanticism to bear upon an important and growing field of research: appetite and its related discourses of taste and consumption. As consumption, in all its metaphorical variety, comes to displace the body as a theoritical site for challenging the distinction between inside and outside, food itself has attracted attention as a device to interrogate the rhetoric and politics of Romanticism. In brief, the volume initiates a dialogue between the cultural politics of food and eating, and the philosophical implications of ingestion, digestion and excretion.

Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite brims with fresh material: from fish and chips to the first curry house in Britain, from mother's milk to Marx, from Kant on dinner parties to Mary Wollstonecraft on toilets. It examines a wide variety of Romantic writers: Hegel, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats, and lesser-known writers such as William Henry Ireland and Charles Piggot. It includes a look at some legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth century, such as the work of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre and Philip Larkin. Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite is a volume of interdisciplinary essays that brings together a wide range of scholarship in diet studies, a growing field that investigates connections between food, drink and culture, including literature, philosophy and history. The collection considers the full range of social, cultural, political and philosophical phenomena associated with food in the Romantic period, reconsidering issues of race, class and gender, as well as those of colonialism, imperialism, and science. Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite brings two major critical impulses within the field of Romanticism to bear upon an important and growing field of research: appetite and its related discourses of taste and consumption. As consumption--in all its metaphorical variety--comes to displace the body as a theoretical site for challenging the distinction between inside and outside, food itself has attracted as a device to interrogate the rhetoric and politics of Romanticism. In brief, the volume initiates a dialogue between the cultural politics of food and eating, and the philosophical implications of ingestion, digestion, and excretion.

Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death. In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine. It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture. --

When does eating become art? The Aesthetics of Taste answers this question by exploring the position of taste in contemporary culture and the manner in which taste meanders its way into the realm of art. The argument identifies aesthetic values not only in artistic practices, where they are naturally expected, but also in the spaces of everydayness that seem far removed from the domain of fine arts. As such, it seeks to grasp what artists – who offer aesthetic as well as culinary experiences – actually try to communicate, while also pondering whether a cook can be an artist.

Winner of the 2013 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association Winner of the 2013 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food, visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning. Combing through a visually stunning and rare archive of children’s literature, architectural history, domestic manuals, dietetic tracts, novels and advertising, Racial Indigestion tells the story of the consolidation of nationalist mythologies of whiteness via the erotic politics of consumption. Less a history of commodities than a history of eating itself, the book seeks to understand how eating became a political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race and class inequality and, finally, the queer pleasures and pitfalls of a burgeoning commodity culture. In so doing, Racial Indigestion sheds light on contemporary “foodie” culture’s vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism and race privilege. For more, visit the author's tumblr page: http://racialindigestion.tumblr.com

Food and the Literary Imagination explores ways in which the food chain and anxieties about its corruption and disruption are represented in poetry, theatre and the novel. The book relates its findings to contemporary concerns about food security.

This book is about the role of food in the works of Joseph Conrad, analysing the social, political and anthropological context of references to meals, eating, food production and cannibalism. It offers a new perspective on the works of Joseph Conrad and provides an accessible medium through which readers can engage with the complex theories and philosophical dilemmas that Conrad presents in his fiction. This is the only major study of food in Conrad’s works; it is unique in its interdisciplinary approach to food in that it engages with sociological, political, historical, personal and literary perspectives, thus providing a multi-dimensional approach to cultural, revolutionary, periodical and fictional representations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This in turn, allows an interrogation of modern anxieties, embedded in cultural norms and values that can be interpreted through the way that food is prepared and eaten.

Over the past decade there has been a remarkable flowering of interest in food and nutrition, both within the popular media and in academia. Scholars are increasingly using foodways, food systems and eating habits as a new unit of analysis within their own disciplines, and students are rushing into classes and formal degree programs focused on food. Introduced by the editor and including original articles by over thirty leading food scholars from around the world, the Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies offers students, scholars and all those interested in food-related research a one-stop, easy-to-use reference guide. Each article includes a brief history of food research within a discipline or on a particular topic, a discussion of research methodologies and ideological or theoretical positions, resources for research, including archives, grants and fellowship opportunities, as well as suggestions for further study. Each entry also explains the logistics of succeeding as a student and professional in food studies. This clear, direct Handbook will appeal to those hoping to start a career in academic food studies as well as those hoping to shift their research to a food-related project. Strongly interdisciplinary, this work will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.

Examining the ways in which hypochondria forms both a malady and a metaphor for a range of British Romantic writers, Grinnell contends that this is not one illness amongst many, but a disorder of the very ability to distinguish between illness and health, a malady of interpretation that mediates a broad spectrum of pressing cultural questions.

Transnational in scope, this much-needed volume explores how modernist writers and artists address and critique the dramatic changes to food systems that took place in the early twentieth century. During this period, small farms were being replaced with industrial agriculture, political upheavals exacerbated food scarcity in many countries, and globalization opened up new modes of distributing culinary commodities. Looking at a unique variety of art forms by authors, painters, filmmakers, and chefs from Ireland, Italy, France, the United States, India, the former Soviet Union, and New Zealand, contributors draw attention to modernist representations of food, from production to distribution and consumption. They consider Oscar Wilde’s aestheticization of food, Katherine Mansfield’s use of eggs as a feminist symbol, Langston Hughes’s use of chocolate as a redemptive metaphor for blackness, hospitality in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Ernest Hemingway’s struggles with gender and sexuality as expressed through food and culinary objects, Futurist cuisine, avant-garde cookbooks, and the impact of national famines on the work of James Joyce, Viktor Shklovsky, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay. Less celebrated topics of putrefaction and waste are analyzed in discussions of food as both a technology of control and a tool for resistance. The diverse themes and methodologies assembled here underscore the importance of food studies not only for the literary and visual arts but also for social transformation. The cultural work around food, the editors argue, determines what is produced, who has access to it, and what can or will change. A milestone volume, this collection uncovers new links between seemingly disparate spaces, cultures, and artistic media and demystifies the connection between modernist aesthetics and the emerging food cultures of a globalizing world. Contributors: Giles Whiteley | Aimee Gasston | Randall Wilhelm | Bradford Taylor | Sean Mark | Céline Mansanti | Shannon Finck