Call for Papers:

Consuming Culture: The Eating Pleasures and Problems
of Western Modernity

Proposals are invited for contributions to a
collection of essays on the social functions, cultural
meanings, and changing representations of food in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The ways in which the consumption of food with all its
pleasures, vices, and problems reflected and
contributed to the formation of Western modernity will
be central to this interdisciplinary study. What was
the role of food 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 new eating problems specific to the
development of Western modernity, and if so, what was
the extent of their influence on food as we have come
to know it?
Possible topics include, but are by no means limited
to:
- the erotics of eating
- the consumption of leisure and luxurious food
- eating and sociability/snobbery
- class distinctions and fashionable meal times
- the cultural histories of breakfast, elevenses,
luncheon, dinner, supper, &c.
- exotic food and food taboos
- Empire and the commercialisation of consumption
- sugar and slavery
- colonial eating habits
- ecocriticism and vegetarianism
- religious fasting and campaigns against alcoholism
- table manners and decorations and their symbolic
functions
- eating problems 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 the arts
Please send one-page abstracts and a brief CV to
Tamara S. Wagner
Department of English Language & Literature
NUS
Blk AS 5, 7 Arts Link
Singapore 117570

Email: elltsw_at_nus.edu.sg

Submission deadline for abstracts is 31 July 2004

=====

Tamara S. Wagner

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

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Received on Sat Jan 17 2004 - 20:56:44 EST