ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the collection of essays contained in this book. The years 1820 to 1945 provide a rich context for an investigation into both cookbooks themselves and the many other iterations of the meeting point between the edible and the textual. The first section of this volume explores the fraught relationship between childhood reading and eating. Ideas about greed and gluttony are explored further through their inverse, hunger and appetite, in the essays which form section two. The third section demonstrates how the parameters of both self-definition and communal identity were open not only to change, but to manipulation in the competitive capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The lines between domestic labour and pleasure, and people's imaginative and emotional experience of food, are interrogated in the fourth and final part of the volume.
