Book News: Modernist morsels

Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde 

EDITED BY JESSICA MARTELL, ADAM FAJARDO, AND PHILIP KEEL GEHEBER

UP of Florida, 2019; Hardcover: $85.00

ISBN 13: 9780813056159

https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813056159

Transnational in scope, this much-needed volume explores how modernist writers and artists address and critique the dramatic changes to food systems that took place in the early twentieth century. During this period, small farms were being replaced with industrial agriculture, political upheavals exacerbated food scarcity in many countries, and globalization opened up new modes of distributing culinary commodities. 

Looking at a unique variety of art forms by authors, painters, filmmakers, and chefs from Ireland, Italy, France, the United States, India, the former Soviet Union, and New Zealand, contributors draw attention to modernist representations of food, from production to distribution and consumption. They consider Oscar Wilde’s aestheticization of food, Katherine Mansfield’s use of eggs as a feminist symbol, Langston Hughes’s use of chocolate as a redemptive metaphor for blackness, hospitality in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Ernest Hemingway’s struggles with gender and sexuality as expressed through food and culinary objects, Futurist cuisine, avant-garde cookbooks, and the impact of national famines on the work of James Joyce, Viktor Shklovsky, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay. Less celebrated topics of putrefaction and waste are analyzed in discussions of food as both a technology of control and a tool for resistance.  

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist literary studies. These announcements do not constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The diverse themes and methodologies assembled here underscore the importance of food studies not only for the literary and visual arts but also for social transformation. The cultural work around food, the editors argue, determines what is produced, who has access to it, and what can or will change. A milestone volume, this collection uncovers new links between seemingly disparate spaces, cultures, and artistic media and demystifies the connection between modernist aesthetics and the emerging food cultures of a globalizing world.  

Jessica Martell is visiting assistant professor of English at Appalachian State University. Adam Fajardo is assistant professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College. Philip Keel Geheber is adjunct instructor of English at Fordham University.

Contributors: Giles Whiteley | Aimee Gasston | Randall Wilhelm | Bradford Taylor | Sean Mark | Céline Mansanti | Shannon Finck | Matthew Hayward | David A. Davis | Philip Keel Geheber | Chrissie Van Mierlo | Graig Uhlin  | Asiya Bulatova | Jessica Martell | Brooke Stanley | Carrie Helms Tippen | Adam Fajardo