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 women’s 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 children’s 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, women’s studies and material culture.
- ISBN10 0719086442
- ISBN13 9780719086441
- Publish Date 30 November 2011 (first published 10 November 2009)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Manchester University Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 224
- Language English