Includes bibliographical references (pages 208-212) and index.
Contents:
Prologue: Food Security and the Literary Imagination -- 1. Food Matters -- 2. The Field in Time -- 3. Chaucer's Pilgrims and a Medieval Game of Food -- 4. Remembering the Land in Shakespeare's Plays -- 5. Keats's Ode 'To Autumn': Touching the Stubble-Plains -- 6. The Mill in Time: George Eliot and the New Agronomy -- Epilogue: The Literary Imagination and the Future of Food.
Summary:
"People, international agencies and governments are increasingly concerned about the nature of our food, where it comes from, and the conditions in which it is produced. By close reading of a wide sweep of historical literature, including works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats and George Eliot, Food and the Literary Imagination shows that such anxieties are nothing new, and that we are not confronting them alone. Too often, we engage with our rural, worked environments through the lens of apparently sentimental and incidental literary representations. The book recovers lost understandings of the materiality of life and sustenance for the authors and their first readers"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.