Food and Literature Cambridge Critical Concepts Series

This volume examines food as subject, form, landscape, polemic, and aesthetic statement in literature. With essays analyzing food and race, queer food, intoxicated poets, avant-garde food writing, vegetarianism, the recipe, the supermarket, food comics, and vampiric eating, this collection brings together fascinating work from leading scholars in the field. It is the first volume to offer an overview of literary food studies and reflect on its origins, developments, and applications. Taking up maxims such as 'we are what we eat', it traces the origins of literary food studies and examines key questions in cultural texts from different global literary traditions. It charts the trajectories of the field in relation to work in critical race studies, postcolonial studies, and children's literature, positing an omnivorous method for the field at large.

Introduction. Writing on food and literature Gitanjali Shahani; Part I. Origins: 1. Commensality David B. Goldstein; 2. The drive-thru supermarket: shopping carts and the foodscapes of American literature Andrew Warnes; 3. Gothic vegetarianism Parama Roy; 4. Good taste, good food, and the gastronome Denise Gigante; 5. The art of the recipe: American food writing avant-la-lettre J. Michelle Coghlan; 6. Existential disgust and the food of the philosopher Robert Appelbaum; Part II. Developments: 7. Visceral encounters: critical race studies and modern food fiction Catherine Keyser; 8. The ethics of eating together: the case of French postcolonial literature Valérie Loichot; 9. Eating athwart and queering food writing Elspeth Probyn; 10. Utilizing food studies with children's literature and its scholarship Scott Pollard and Kara Keeling; 11. Avant-garde food writing, modernist cuisine Allison Carruth; 12. Comic books and the culinary logic of late capitalism Rohit Chopra; Part III. Applications: 13. Inebriation: the poetics of drink Sandra Gilbert; 14. Vampires, alterity, and strange eating Jennifer Park; 15. Toast and the familiar in children's literature Frances E. Dolan; 16. Food, humour, and gender in Ishigaki Rin's poems Tomoko Aoyama; 17. Food, hunger, and Irish identity: self-starvation in Colum McCann's 'Hunger Strike' Miriam Mara; 18. Postcolonial hungers Deepika Bahri; Afterword Darra Goldstein.

Gitanjali Shahani is Associate Professor of English at San Francisco State University. She has co-edited Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture (2009). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Studies, and several edited collections. She is currently completing a book on food, race, and colonialism in the early modern period.