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The book offers readings of discourses about food in a wide range of sources, from canonical Victorian novels by authors such as Dickens, Gaskell, and Hardy to parliamentary speeches, royal proclamations, and Amendment Acts. It considers the cultural politics and poetics of food in relation to issues of race, class, gender, regionalism, urbanization, colonialism, and imperialism in order to discover how national identity and Otherness are constructed and internalized.

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Introduction: The Belly of a Nation PART I: Eating English Corn Kings: Disraeli, Hardy, and the Reconciliation of Nations Men and Menus: Dickens and the Rise of the "Ordinary" English Gentleman "I have no country": Domesticating the Generic National Woman PART II: Alien Appetites "Miss Sharp adores pork": Ingesting India from The Missionary to The Moonstone Blood and Rum: Power and the Racialization of the Victorian Monster Conclusion: The Bill of Fare-Thee-Well

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´Cozzi´s close readings are informed with a wealth of historical context, and her textual juxtapositions are shrewd and illuminating . . . The book is an immensely valuable contribution to the study of nationalism, while the focus on food adds richly to the scholarship on diet and on the Victorian novel. Her historical schema is also highly suggestive, particularly in its implications for Romanticism, whose historical coincidence with the Consumer Revolution still has yet to be fully investigated.´ - The Wordsworth Circle

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Annette Cozzi isAssistant Professor ofHumanitiesandCultural Studies at the University of South Florida.

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