The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food

This Companion rethinks food in literature from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to contemporary food blogs, and recovers cookbooks as literary texts.

This Companion provides an engaging and expansive overview of gustation, gastronomy, agriculture and alimentary activism in literature from the medieval period to the present day. It rethinks literary food from a variety of critical angles, including gender and sexuality, race studies, postcolonial studies, eco-criticism and children's literature.This Companion provides an engaging and expansive overview of gustation, gastronomy, agriculture and alimentary activism in literature from the medieval period to the present day, as well as an illuminating introduction to cookbooks as literature. Bringing together sixteen original essays by leading scholars, the collection rethinks literary food from a variety of critical angles, including gender and sexuality, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, eco-criticism and children's literature. Topics covered include mealtime decorum in Chaucer, Milton's culinary metaphors, early American taste, Romantic gastronomy, Victorian eating, African-American women's culinary writing, modernist food experiments, Julia Child and cold war cooking, industrialized food in children's literature, agricultural horror and farmworker activism, queer cookbooks, hunger as protest and postcolonial legacy, and 'dude food' in contemporary food blogs. Featuring a chronology of key publication and historical dates and a comprehensive bibliography of further reading, this Companion is an indispensible guide to an exciting field for students and instructors.