We have extended the deadline for abstracts for a
collection of essays on "Consuming Culture,"
originally posted under the working title of
"Consuming Culture: The Eating Pleasures and Problems
of Western Modernity," to 30 September 2004.

An academic press has already expressed interest in
the proposed collection.

Please note also the change in submission and contact
details.

CONSUMING CULTURE: FOOD FICTIONS AND THE CONSUMPTION
OF WESTERN MODERNITY IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH
CENTURIES

Proposals are invited for contributions to a
collection of essays on the social functions, cultural
meaning, and changing representations of consumption
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ways
in which food and drink, tobacco, caffeine, consumable
exotica, and luxury products in general reflected and
contributed to the formation of Western modernity will
be central to this interdisciplinary study. What was
the role of eating, drinking, and shopping in the
growing preoccupation with consumption and leisure in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How did the
search for luxury goods redirect discourses of Empire,
medicine, or Puritanism? How did food taboos,
exoticism, and ecocriticism figure within their
cultural fictions, and how were they represented or
harnessed in the politics, literature, and arts of the
time? Were debates on the pleasures of the table and
the social roles of food adulteration or eating - and
shopping - problems specific to the development of
Western modernity, and if so, what was the extent of
their influence on the rising consumer culture as we
have come to know it?

Possible topics include, but are by no means limited
to:
- the fiction, architecture, and topography of
consumption
- the erotics of eating
- the consumption of leisure and luxury food
- exotic food and food taboos
- Empire and the commercialisation of consumption
- sugar and slavery
- colonial eating habits
- eating and sociability/snobbery
- class distinctions and fashionable meal times
- the cultural histories of breakfast, elevenses,
luncheon, dinner, supper, &c.
- ecocriticism and vegetarianism
- religious fasting and campaigns against alcoholism
- food and the spectacle: table manners and
decorations, hotel and restaurant architecture,
Victorian medievalism and the recreated banquet
- eating problems, food adulteration, and their
(literary) representations
- smoking, drinking, hunting and gender-specific
ideals of eating
- gluttony, hunger, and the cultural fables of the
French Revolution
- food production and distribution
- consuming the Great Exhibition
- eating/consumption as metaphors in politics,
literature, and discourses on (consumer) culture and
the arts

Please send one-page abstracts and a brief CV or
author profile to

Tamara S. Wagner (Asst.Prof.)
English Literature
S3.2-B2-14
Division of English
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, NTU
Nanyang Avenue
Singapore 639798
Email: tamarasilviawagner_at_yahoo.com.sg

Submission deadline for abstracts is 30 September
2004. Email submissions (attached word documents or
in-line text) are preferred.

=====

Tamara S. Wagner

http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/staff/home/ELLTSW/

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Received on Tue Jun 22 2004 - 21:35:02 EDT