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This Companion rethinks food in literature from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to contemporary food blogs, and recovers cookbooks as literary texts.
List of contents
Introduction: the literature of food J. Michelle Coghlan; 1. Medieval feasts Aaron K. Hostetter; 2. The art of early modern cookery Joe Moshenska; 3. The Romantic revolution in taste Denise Gigante; 4. The matter of early American taste Lauren Klein; 5. The culinary landscape of Victorian literature Kate Thomas; 6. Modernism and gastronomy Allison Carruth; 7. Cold War cooking J. Michelle Coghlan; 8. Farm horror in the twentieth century Michael Newbury; 9. Queering the cookbook Katharina Vester; 10. Guilty pleasures in children's literature Catherine Keyser; 11. Postcolonial tastes Parama Roy; 12. Black power in the kitchen Erica Fretwell; 13. Farmworker activism Sarah D. Wald; 14. Digesting Asian America Anne Anlin Cheng; 15. Postcolonial foodways in contemporary African literature Jonathan Bishop Highfield; 16. Blogging food, performing gender Emily Contois.
About the author
J. Michelle Coghlan is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of Sensational Internationalism: the Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century (2016), which won the 2017 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize in American Studies. Her articles have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, the Henry James Review, and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, and several edited collections, including Gitanjali G. Shahani's Literature and Food (Cambridge, 2018). She is currently completing a book on food writing and the making of American taste in the nineteenth century.
Summary
This Companion provides an engaging and expansive overview of gustation, gastronomy, agriculture and alimentary activism in literature from the medieval period to the present day. It rethinks literary food from a variety of critical angles, including gender and sexuality, race studies, postcolonial studies, eco-criticism and children's literature.
