Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-century American Literature

This study inspects the preponderance and significance of food imagery in literary texts by nineteenth-century American writers.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - Monika Elbert and Marie Drews * PART I: Culinary Etiquette and Capitalist Appetites: Consumption and Economies of Food * Suburban Men at the Table: Culinary Aesthetics in the Mid-Century Country Book - Maura D'Amore * Conspicuous Consumption: Howells, James, and the Gilded Age Restaurant - Mark McWilliams * "Bonbons in Abundance": The Politics of Sweetness in Kate Chopin's Fiction - Andrew Dix and Lorna Piatti * PART II: Confrontations and Negotiations: Power Dynamics at the American Table * Whale as Dish: Culinary Rhetoric and the Discourse of Power in Moby-Dick - Robert T. Tally Jr. * Catharine Beecher, Harriet E. Wilson, and Domestic Discomfort at the Northern Table - Marie Drews * "True and Faithful in Everything": Recipes for Servant and Class Reform in Catherine Owen's Cookbook Novels - Kim Cohen * PART III: Palatable Virtues: Models of Citizenship and the National Cuisine * Doughnuts and Gingerbread, Apples and Pears: Boyhood Food Economies in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals for Children - Lorinda Cohoon * The Edible Book: White Female Pleasure and Novel Reading - Cree LeFavour * The Perfect Dinner: Hawthorne's Ruminations on Old and New England - Monika Elbert * PART IV: Man Does Not Live on Bread Alone: The Paradox of Nourishment * Hunger, Panic, Refusal: The Gift of Food in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World - Hildegard Hoeller * Strawberries and Salt: Culinary Hazards and Moral Education in Little Women - Yvonne Elizabeth Pelletier * "This Foreshadowed Food": Representations of Food and Hunger in Emily Dickinson's American Gothic - Elizabeth Andrews * Consumption and Cannibalism in the Altrurian Romances of William Dean Howells - Lance Rubin