Synopses & Reviews
The study of food in literature complicates established critical positions. Both a libidinal pleasure and the ultimate commodity, food in fiction can represent sex as well as money and brings the body and the marketplace together in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes unsettling. Spilling the Beans explores these relations in the context of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century womens fiction, where concerns about bodily, economic, and intellectual productivity and consumption power decades of novels, conduct books, and popular medicine. The introduction suggests ways in which attention to food in these texts might complicate recent developments in literary theory and criticism, while the body of the book is devoted to close readings of novels and childrens stories by Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Susan Ferrier. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, womens studies, and material culture.
Synopsis
Spilling the Beans shows how late eighteenth and early nineteenth century anxieties about women's consumption and production are manifest in novelists' and novels' accounts of what heroines, readers and writers do with food.
About the Author
Sarah Moss is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements * Introduction * Eating Her Words * The Material Aliment * The Bill of Fare * Eating for Britain * Afterword * Bibliography