The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food Cambridge Companions to Literature Series

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, as well as an illuminating introduction to cookbooks as literature. Bringing together sixteen original essays by leading scholars, the collection rethinks literary food from a variety of critical angles, including gender and sexuality, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, eco-criticism and children's literature. Topics covered include mealtime decorum in Chaucer, Milton's culinary metaphors, early American taste, Romantic gastronomy, Victorian eating, African-American women's culinary writing, modernist food experiments, Julia Child and cold war cooking, industrialized food in children's literature, agricultural horror and farmworker activism, queer cookbooks, hunger as protest and postcolonial legacy, and 'dude food' in contemporary food blogs. Featuring a chronology of key publication and historical dates and a comprehensive bibliography of further reading, this Companion is an indispensible guide to an exciting field for students and instructors.

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.

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.