The barbarous feast : eating and writing in the eighteenth-century world / Sophie Gee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gee, Sophie, 1974- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Food habits in literature.

Literature, Modern--18th century--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

English fiction--18th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Food habits--History.

Food habits.

Genre:

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 336 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Eating and writing in the eighteenth-century world

Eating and writing in the 18th-century world

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2026]

Summary:

"In The Barbarous Feast, Sophie Gee argues that novels and eating rituals were interconnected, but conflicting, systems used to depict selfhood and represent personal inwardness in colonial Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Gee tells a vibrant story of how people living at the margins of colonial power drew upon eating and writing to manage their own interior lives. She coins the term 'metabolic subjectivity' to describe the idea of energetic, embodied selfhood that is made by eating and drinking and which connects humans to other living species. This concept, while taken from colonial eating rituals, offers new ways to understand personal inwardness in written texts. Gee tells intersecting stories of eating and writing that range from the Protestant Lord's Supper to West Indian Indigenous predation rituals. Gee alternates chapters of literary analysis, offering new readings of Daniel Defoe, Richard Ligon, Richard Steele, Henry Fielding, and others, with personal nonfiction essays exploring the afterlife of empire and imperial inwardness in Australia. With The Barbarous Feast, she offers an expansive account of inwardness in and out of novels, and across countries, historical periods, and cultures, putting literary studies in conversation with environmental studies, religious history, Indigenous studies, and food studies."-- ǂc Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: A Beginning and an Ending

I. Bronte Gully

1. Do This in Remembrance of Me

II. Meat: Port Albert

2. Viper Mind

III. Amphibious Believers

3. Friday's Cannibal Nature

IV. Water and Wine: Beechworth

4. Eating Flesh and Eating Dirt

V. Oyster Mind

5. You Say "Bonano

VI. The Inner Lives of Mangroves

6. Eating and Believing in Tom Jones

VII. Hungry Stomach: Binginwarri

Appendix: The Sacrament from Calvin to Locke.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-691-20973-1

0-691-29023-7

OCLC:

1591751848