Culinary aesthetics and practices in nineteenth-century American literature / edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Elbert, Monika M. (Monika Maria), 1956-

Drews, Marie.

Series:

Nineteenth-century major lives and letters

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Food in literature.

Food habits in literature.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Physical Description:

viii, 267 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Summary:

Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the preponderance of food imagery in nineteenth-century literary texts. Contributors to this volume analyze the social, political, and cultural implications of scenes involving food and dining and illustrate how "aesthetic" notions of culinary preparation are often undercut by the actual practices of cooking and eating. As contributors interrogate the values and meanings behind culinary discourses, they complicate commonplace notions about American identity and question the power structure behind food production and consumption.

Contents:

Introduction / Monika Elbert and Marie Drews

pt. 1. Culinary etiquette and capitalist appetites: consumption and economies of food. Suburban men at the table: culinary aesthetics in the mid-century country book / Maura D'Amore

Conspicuous consumption: Howells, James, and the gilded age restaurant / Mark McWilliams

"Bonbons in abundance": the politics of sweetness in Kate Chopin's fiction / Andrew Dix and Lorna Piatti

pt. 2. Confrontations and negotiations: power dynamics at the American table. Whale as a dish: culinary rhetoric and the discourse of power in Moby-Dick / Robert T. Tally Jr.

Catharine Beecher, Harriet E. Wilson, and domestic discomfort at the northern table / Marie Drews

"True and faithful in everything": recipes for servant and class reform in Catherine Owen's cookbook novels / Kim Cohen

pt. 3. Palatable virtues: models of citizenship and the national cuisine. Doughnuts and gingerbread, apples and pears: boyhood food economies in nineteenth-century periodicals for children / Lorinda B. Cohoon

The edible book: white female pleasure and novel reading / Cree LeFavour

The perfect dinner: Hawthorne's ruminations on old and New England / Monika Elbert

pt. 4. Man does not live on bread alone: the paradox of nourishment. Hunger, panic, refusal: the gift of food in Susan Warner's The wide, wide world / Hildegard Hoeller

Strawberries and salt: culinary hazards and moral education in Little women / Yvonne Elizabeth Pelletier

"This foreshadowed food": representations of food and hunger in Emily Dickinson's American gothic / Elizabeth Andrews

Consumption and cannibalism in the altrurian romances of William Dean Howells / Lance Rubin.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780230616288

0230616283

OCLC:

434562101