ABSTRACT
This volume explores the intersection between culinary history and literature across a period of profound social and cultural change. Split into four parts, essays focus on the relationships between eating and childhood reading in the Victorian era, the role of hunger in depicting social instability and reform, the cultivation of taste through advertising and the formation of cultural legacies through imaginative and emotional experiences of food and drink. Contributors show that studying consumption is necessary for a full understanding of class, gender, national identity and the body. The works of writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Lear, Isabella Beeton and Bram Stoker are considered alongside advice manuals, Home Front narratives and advertising to provide an innovative work that will be of interest to scholars of social, cultural and medical history as well as literary studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|48 pages
Devouring didacticism
chapter 2|25 pages
Onions and honey, roast spiders and chutney
part II|41 pages
An appetite for change
chapter 3|21 pages
The rhetoric of taste
part III|59 pages
The power of the printed word
part IV|42 pages
Into the twentieth century