Austerity measures : the poetics of food insecurity in early modern English literature / Anders M. Greene-Crow.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Greene-Crow, Anders M., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

English poetry--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English poetry.

Food security in literature.

Hunger in literature.

Food--Moral and ethical aspects.

Food.

Literature and society--England--History--16th century.

Literature and society.

Literature and society--England--History--17th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : illustrations, facsimiles

Other Title:

Poetics of food insecurity in early modern English literature

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2025].

Summary:

"Explores how early modern writers used poetry to fight food insecurityAusterity Measures explores how early modern writers used poetic form as a tool to fight extreme food insecurity. Authors such as Thomas Tusser, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Anne Bradstreet, and Thomas Tryon witnessed the privatization of public farmland, rising food prices amidst uncontrolled inflation, mass starvation in nascent North American colonies, and the racist violence of the Caribbean plantation slavery system. Anders M. Greene-Crow shows how these authors experimented with literary form in an effort to change readers’ beliefs and behaviors with regard to food ethics.By examining this history, Greene-Crow sheds new light on both modern-day food ethics and activism’s place in literary writing. This book traces how authors’ solutions to food insecurity turned away from structural models of communal care and toward the now-dominant consumer-capitalist model championing individual dietary choice. Simultaneously, he reveals why literary criticism began to discount literature’s power as a tool for social change. The New Critical school, whose close reading methodology dominates literary analysis, arose out of Southern Agrarianism, a movement that sought to return the South to antebellum structures of racial hierarchy and labor exploitation that took shape in the early modern period. These intersectional labor politics underlie close reading, continuing to limit critics’ understanding of how literary form produces social change, and reinforcing the scarcity culture of literature departments today.By recovering poetry’s role as a force for affecting readers’ relationship to one of their most basic needs—the need to eat—Austerity Measures develops an alternative methodology that takes writers’ material conditions into account in analyzing form."--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction. Starving Writers: A Food History of Literary Form and Criticism

Chapter 1. Verse Form for Thriftier Farms: Thomas Tusser’s Agrarian-Economic Poetics and Its Afterlives

Chapter 2. Food Restriction at the Community Table: Making Hunger Palatable in George Herbert’s and Robert Herrick’s Poetics of Dietary Ethics

Chapter 3. Aestheticizing Food Insecurity in Anne Bradstreet’s Poetics of Meanness

Chapter 4. Clean Eating: Recipe Form as a Tool for Internalizing Food Ethics in Thomas Tryon’s Writing

Epilogue. The Agrarian History of Close Reading and the Future of Academic Labor.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource, publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Other Format:

Print version: Greene-Crow, Anders M. Austerity Measures

ISBN:

9781512826265

OCLC:

1477998915