The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction - (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters) by A Cozzi (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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."

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

'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

About the Author

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