Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism
Author: Timothy Morton
Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite brims with fresh material: from fish and chips to the first curry house in Britain, from mother's milk to Marx, from Kant on dinner parties to Mary Wollstonecraft on toilets. It examines a wide variety of Romantic writers: Hegel, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats, and lesser-known writers such as William Henry Ireland and Charles Piggot. It includes a look at some legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth century, such as the work of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre and Philip Larkin.
Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite is a volume of interdisciplinary essays that brings together a wide range of scholarship in diet studies, a growing field that investigates connections between food, drink and culture, including literature, philosophy and history. The collection considers the full range of social, cultural, political and philosophical phenomena associated with food in the Romantic period, reconsidering issues of race, class and gender, as well as those of colonialism, imperialism, and science. Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite brings two major critical impulses within the field of Romanticism to bear upon an important and growing field of research: appetite and its related discourses of taste and consumption. As consumption--in all its metaphorical variety--comes to displace the body as a theoretical site for challenging the distinction between inside and outside, food itself has attracted as a device to interrogate the rhetoric and politics of Romanticism. In brief, the volume initiates a dialogue between the cultural politics of food and eating, and the philosophicalimplications of ingestion, digestion, and excretion.
Table of Contents:
| List of Illustrations | |
| Acknowledgments | |
| Notes on Contributors | |
| Preface | |
| Introduction: Consumption as Performance: The Emergence of the Consumer in the Romantic Period | 1 |
| Ch. 1 | William Henry Ireland: From Forgery to Fish 'n' Chips | 21 |
| Ch. 2 | The Taste of Paradise: The Fruits of Romanticism in the Empire | 41 |
| Ch. 3 | The Politics of the Platter: Charlotte Smith and the "Science of Eating" | 59 |
| Ch. 4 | Sustaining the Romantic and Racial Self: Eating People in the "South Seas" | 77 |
| Ch. 5 | Eating Romantic England: The Foot and Mouth Epidemic and Its Consequences | 97 |
| Ch. 6 | Hegel, Eating: Schelling and the Carnivorous Virility of Philosophy | 115 |
| Ch. 7 | Byron's World of Zest | 141 |
| Ch. 8 | Beyond the Inconsumable: The Catastrophic Sublime and the Destruction of Literature in Keat's The Fall of Hyperion and Shelley's The Triumph of life | 161 |
| Ch. 9 | The Endgame of Taste: Keats, Sartre, Beckett | 183 |
| Ch. 10 | A "Friendship of Taste": The Aesthetics of Eating Well in Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View | 203 |
| Ch. 11 | (In)digestible Material: Illness and Dialectic in Hegel's The Philosophy of Nature | 217 |
| Ch. 12 | Romantic Dietetics! Or, Eating Your Way to a New You | 237 |
| Afterword: Let Them Eat Romanticism: Materialism, Ideology, and Diet Studies | 257 |
| Index | 277 |
New interesting textbook: Cannibal Island or Inclusion
Lorenza's Italian Seasons: 200 Recipes for Family and Friends
Author: Lorenza de Medici
The four seasons -- or le quattro stagioni -- have always had the most profound effect on the way we cook, inspiring us to improvise with the finest and freshest produce nature has to offer. In Lorenza's Italian Seasons, Lorenza de'Medici presents her favourite classic and contemporary recipes which reflect the Italian year.
With the expertise that permeates her famous cookery school in Tuscany, Lorenza teaches us to savour the best seasonal ingredients. Sweet, tender broad beans from the spring garden are used in a simple salad with pecorino, olive oil and parsley; softly scented, warm-skinned apricots from summer orchards are transformed into a fragrant yoghurt and apricot mousse; musky wild mushrooms from the autumn woods become the basis of an elegant dish of roast partridge; and dark-leaved cavolo nero from the frosty winter soil is an essential ingredient for authentic ribollita, the thick bean and vegetable soup of Tuscany. Recipes such as Cinghiale ai Mirtilli Rossi (Wild Boar with Cranberries), Pan coi Santi (All Saints' Day Bread), and Torta di Pinoli al Limone (Lemon and Pine Nut Tart) tell of the changing landscape and weather, of religious festivals celebrated and observed, of harvests, blossoming orchards and sleeping winter fields.
In Lorenza's introductions to each season, food is described in context to each seasonal celebration which bring joy to cooking and eating -- a torch-lit supper in the Renaissance garden of the family estate, Badia a Coltibuono, as well as simpler feasts, such as family picnics with her eight grandchildren, for which she prepares fresh wholegrain bread, a pasta salad with fresh cherry tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, basil and extra virgin olive oil and a creamy panna cotta with fresh summer berries. Feast menus for every season -- Easter, Midsummer, Autumn and Christmas -- accompany each chapter, while a store cupboard section provides recipes and tips for preserving and storing produce for other occasions.
