Altered appetites : food and metaphor in early modern England
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Beginning in the sixteenth century, European tastes were confronted with several cataclysmic upheavals. A market flooded with unfamiliar foodstuffs—sugar, potatoes, tobacco, and more—altered diets and scrambled the semiotics of food and identity. Increased encounters with peoples and resources across the Atlantic led to strange fears and destructive hungers, while the Protestant Reformation turned the eucharist into a contested site of consumption. As Robert Burton cautions in The Anatomy of Melancholy, food or drink could unmake a person: "thus they many times wilfully pervert the good temperature of their bodies, " he writes of gluttons, "stifle their wits, strangle nature, and degenerate into beasts." In other words, be warned: you are what you eat. In my dissertation, I suggest that appetite is an important concept for early modern writers, defining how the self relates to others within a social sphere and within a material world. The appetites I study in each chapter shift and alter depending on the demands of each literary context, but always there remains a kernel of contradiction between anticipation and satiation: reading both defers and incites appetite, both for pleasure and for disgust.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Smith-Drelich, Hannah |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Orgel, Stephen |
| Thesis advisor | Parker, Patricia |
| Degree committee member | Orgel, Stephen |
| Degree committee member | Parker, Patricia |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Hannah Smith-Drelich. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/xq202cs7279 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Hannah Smith-Drelich
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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