The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food

This soon-to-be-published edited volume 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 commissioned essays by leading scholars in the US and UK, 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, and positions itself to be of interest to readers across these fields. 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 scholars alike and is aimed not just at demonstrating the dynamism of the field of literary food studies but at sparking new avenues for research, as well. My editorial contributions include commissioning and editing the volume's 16 chapters, authoring the volume's introduction, chronology, comprehensive guide to suggested further reading, and ground-breaking chapter on Julia Child and the Cold War kitchen.