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Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the preponderance of food imagery in nineteenth-century literary texts. Contributors to this volume analyze the social, political, and cultural implications of scenes involving food and dining and illustrate how "aesthetic" notions of culinary preparation are often undercut by the actual practices of cooking and eating. As contributors interrogate the values and meanings behind culinary discourses, they complicate commonplace notions about American identity and question the power structure behind food production and consumption.

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PART I: CULINARY ETIQUETTE AND CAPITALISTIC APPETITES: CONSUMPTION AND ECONOMIES OF FOOD Imagined Communities: Susan Warner and the Economics of Food; H.Hoeller Suburban Men at the Table: Culinary Aesthetics in the Mid-Century Country Book; M.D´Amore Conspicuous Consumption: Howells, James, and the Gilded Age Restaurant; M.McWilliams Cannibalism and Capitalism in the Altrurian Romances of William Dean Howells; L.Rubin PART II: COOKING UP A STORM: POWER DYNAMICS IN FOOD NARRATIVES Whale as Dish: Culinary Rhetoric and the Discourse of Power in Moby-Dick; R.Tally Domestic Discomfort and Dinner Table Shenanigans: Catharine Beecher Dines in with Our Nig; M.Drews ´Bonbons in abundance´: The Politics of Sweetness in Kate Chopin´s Fiction; A.Dix & L.Piatti ´You don´t know what a good manager I could be´: Managing Class and Consumerism in Catherine Owen´s Cookbook Novels; K.Cohen PART III: PALATABLE VIRTUES: MODELS OF CITIZENSHIP AND THE NATIONAL CUISINE Doughnuts and Gingerbread, Apples and Pears: Boyhood Food Economies in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Series Books For Children; L.Cohoon The Kitchen as Moral Territory; K.Sloan Food for Thought: Dinnertable Discourse, Dyspepsia, and Hawthorne´s Ruminations on Old and New England; M.Elbert The Edible Book: White Female Sexuality and Novel Reading; C.LeFavour PART IV: MAN DOES NOT LIVE ON BREAD ALONE: THE PARADOX OF SPIRITUAL NOURISHMENT Searching for Eupepsia: Bronson Alcott, the Hunger Artist; R.Bellin Strawberries and Salt: Food Preparation as Moral Education in Alcott´s Little Women; Y.Pelletier ´ This foreshadowed Food´: Representations of Food and Hunger in Emily Dickinson´s American Gothic´; E.Andrews Austin´s Consuming ´Desertness´ in The Land of Little Rain; B.Hume

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"Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature makes an original, interestingly diverse, and much-needed contribution to both the cultural study of American literature and the emerging field of critical food studies in the humanities." - Gregory Eiselein, Professor of English and Coffman University Distinguished Teaching Scholar, Kansas State University and author of Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era

"This cross-disciplinary collection investigates the complexities of making uniquely American food scenes out of continued exchanges transporting not merely food, but also its metaphors in a two-way flow of transatlantic responses. Elbert and Drews speak of a culinary declaration of independence as writers of popular fiction as well as of cookbooks and travel accounts shuttled between evocations of abundance and excess, scarcity and frugality to create intriguing culinary metaphors, compelling us to gloss anew changing ways of presenting food in writing." - Tamara S. Wagner, author of Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740-1890 and co-editor of Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption, 1700-1900

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