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Saturday 8th March 2014, University of Warwick
Keynote speakers:
Professor Nicola Humble (University of Roehampton)
Dr. Margaret Beetham (University of Salford)
This one day interdisciplinary conference will explore the
place of food, drink and acts of consumption within the textual culture of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The years 1800-1945 are marked by
food adulteration scandals, the
growth of the temperance movement, and significant reforms in the regulation
and legislation of food standards, as well as the influence of the colonies on
British cuisine and a relationship with food and drink made increasingly
complex by wartime paucity and rationing. These changes are both precipitated
and responded to in a vast array of textual forms, including periodicals, the
press, recipe books, household management manuals, propaganda, literature and
poetry. This conference will therefore engage with the intersections of
food/drink cultures and the written word
We are seeking papers
that explore how food and drink were written experience and imagined during the
period: as a commodity, a luxury item, a source of poison or nutrition, in its
abundance or in short supply. We hope to attract all researchers who have an
interest in the culinary cultures of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, including those working in the histories of medicine, art and food,
as well as anthropologists, historians of the nineteenth century and war years,
and those working in literary studies. By bringing together scholars from many
disciplines, we hope to provide a space in which to open up dialogue about
nineteenth and early twentieth century narratives of eating, drinking,
consuming, and their worth, and to provide a timely examination of our
relationship with food and drink at a moment when economic and ecological
pressures herald a re-appropriation of the values of wartime thrift and
Victorian domestic economy.
Possible topics
might include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Representations of food and drink in specific texts and their wider implications.
- Cultures of eating, drinking and cooking.
- Social histories of food and drink.
- The uses of food and drink in the articulation (or challenging) of community, nation or empire.
- Food or drink as metaphor/trope/structural device.
- The relationship(s) between reading and eating or drinking.
- The role of food and drink in cultural constructions of domestic space.
- Perspectives from ‘fat studies’/‘fat feminism’.
- Gendered practices of food and drink consumption.
- Food and drink in medical/psychiatric discourse: alcoholism, eating disorders, compulsive behaviour.
- The cultural legacies and/or persistence of Victorian and early twentieth century cultural imaging of food and drink.
- Recipe books, household management manuals and aspirational food.
- The narrating of gluttony or hunger.
- Textual representations of farms, breweries, pubs and restaurants.
Applicants should note that papers may also be considered for inclusion in a possible publication resulting from the conference.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note of no more than 100 words, should be sent to devouring2014@gmail.com by 31st October 2013.
This conference is being organised by Mary Addyman, Laura Wood and Christopher Yiannitsaros (University of Warwick).
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/food/
http://devouring2014.blogspot.co.uk/
