Food Drink And The Written Word In Britain 1820 1945

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.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of figures -- Introduction -- PART I: Devouring didacticism: Feeding young minds -- 1 Sweet poison: Food adulteration, fiction and the young glutton -- 2 Onions and honey, roast spiders and chutney: Unusual appetites and disorderly consumption in Edward Lear's nonsense verse -- PART II: An appetite for change: Hunger and nineteenth-century society -- 3 The rhetoric of taste: Reform, hunger and consumption in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton -- 4 Feeding the vampire: the ravenous hunger of the fin de siècle -- PART III: The power of the printed word: Advertising and markets -- 5 'A change comes over the spirit of your vision': Champagne in Britain, 1860-1914 -- 6 The language of advertising: Fashioning health food consumers at the fin de siècle -- PART IV: Into the twentieth century: Legacies and memories -- 7 'Yes, we had no bananas': Sharing memories of the Second World War -- 8 Meeting Mrs Beeton: the personal is political in the recipe book -- Conclusion: 'All else is vain, but eating is real': Gustatory bodies -- List of contributors -- Index

For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.

Winner of the 2022 OIV AWARD 2022 in the History category From its introduction to British society in the mid-17th century champagne has been a wine of elite celebration and hedonism. Champagne in Britain, 1800-1914 is the first book for over a century to study this iconic drink in Britain. Following the British wine market from 1800 to 1914, Harding shows how champagne was consumed by, branded for and marketed to British society. Not only did the champagne market form the foundations of the luxury market we know today, this book shows how it was integral to a number of 19th century social concerns such as the 'temperate turn', anxieties over adulteration and the increasingly prosperous British middle class. Using archival sources from major French producers such as Moët & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot and Pommery & Greno alongside records from British distributors, newspapers, magazines and wine literature, Champagne in Britain shows how champagne became embedded in the habits of Victorian society. Illustrating the social and marketing dynamics that centered on champagne's luxury status, it reveals the importance of fashion as a driver of choice, the power of the label and the illusion of scarcity. It shows how, through the reach of imperial Britain, the British taste for Champagne spread across the globe and became a marker for status and celebration.

Why are so many literary texts preoccupied with food? The Literature of Food explores this question by looking at the continually shifting relationship between two sorts of foods: the real and the imagined. Focusing particularly on Britain and North America from the early 19th century to the present, it covers a wide range of issues including the politics of food, food as performance, and its intersections with gender, class, fear and disgust. Combining the insights of food studies and literary analysis, Nicola Humble considers the multifarious ways in which food both works and plays within texts, and the variety of functions-ideological, mimetic, symbolic, structural, affective-which it serves. Carefully designed and structured for use on the growing number of literature of food courses, it examines the food of modernism, post-modernism, the realist novel and children's literature, and asks what happens when we treat cook books as literary texts. From food memoirs to the changing role of the servant, experimental cook books to the cannibalistic fears in infant picture books, The Literature of Food demonstrates that food is always richer and stranger than we think.

This book skilfully combines cutting-edge historical research by leading and emerging researchers in the field to investigate the utilization of British humour during the Second World War as well as its legacy in British popular culture. Juliette Pattinson and Linsey Robb bring together case studies that address a variety of situations in which humour was generated, including wartime jokes, films, radio, cartoons and private drawings, as well as post-war recollections, museum exhibitions and television comedy. By adopting an original interpretative framework of various wartime and post-war sites, this books opens up the possibility for a more variegated, richer analysis of Britain's wartime experience and its place thereafter in the cultural imagination. Through the lens of humour, this book promises to add critical nuance to our understanding of the functioning of British wartime society. Covering sources such as The British Cartoon Archive, BBC World War II People's War Archive and The Ministry of Information, and including analysis of the lasting role of comedy in Britain's memories and depictions of the war, the result is a rich addition to existing literature of use to students and scholars studying the cultural history of war.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

Agatha Christie has never been substantially considered as a war writer, even though war is a constant presence in her writing. This interdisciplinary collection of essays considers the effects of these conflicts on the social and psychological textures of Christie’s detective fiction and other writings, demonstrating not only Christie’s textual navigation of her contemporary surroundings and politics, but also the value of her voice as a popular fiction writer reflecting popular concerns. Agatha Christie Goes to War introduces the ‘Queen of Crime’ as an essential voice in the discussion of war, warfare, and twentieth century literature.