[Sca-cooks] "The politics of eating and cooking in medieval English romance"

[JIMCHEVAL at aol.com]

Someone on another list sends out lists of dissertations regularly. This  
might interest some here.
   
The politics  of eating and cooking in medieval English romance 

Author:  Hostetter, Aaron Kenneth 

Publication  info: Princeton University, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations 
Publishing, 2011.  3445552. 

http://pitt.idm.oclc.org/login?url=ht
tp://search.proquest.com/docview/854862261?accountid=14709 

Abstract: The  imaginative seat of English narrative poetry lies in the 
stomach. Itself a  delectable genre--a stew of images, idioms, ideas, and 
inspirations--romance  derives part of its pleasure and purpose from 
representations of the material  processes of food. Authors of romance frequently 
mobilize scenes of cooking and  consumption to dramatize political and economic 
tensions in aristocratic  culture--tensions that may expose the ideological 
roots lying beneath the  elaborate literary productions of England. The 
imagination of food in these  vernacular narratives, I argue, caters to the wide 
world around. The Politics of  Eating and Cooking ranges across the literary 
history of the English Middle  Ages, beginning in the Anglo-Saxon era, 
taking a detour into Old French, and  wrapping up in the Middle English of the 
thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. As  technology and taste change over time, 
the representation of food and eating  stays rather more conservative. 
Political questions may shift and vary, but the  signifying, authorizing power 
of cuisine endures. This is because food reminds  us of our basic condition 
in the world, material and spiritual: our relationship  to labor; our concern 
with status, our relation to government; our yearning for  a narrative of 
historical progress. As all my sites of argument suggest, food  plays a 
fundamental role in medieval romance. Food imagery implies a sacrament,  but also 
takes the measure of an often brutal material world. The Politics of  
Eating and Cooking , in its widest scope, shows how the political imaginary of  
medieval narratives emanates from the symbolic, material, and 
phenomenological  presence of food. Food imagery draws the exotic into the quotidian world 
and  brings a resonant mythography to the material bases of social power. 
Key to the  examination of serious social and economic problems, eating and 
cooking expose  the social artifices and the artistic skill of literary works 
through which  culture reads its illuminations and shadows. 

Links:  
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ating+and+cooking+in+medieval+English+romance&rft.issn= 

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page=&rft.isbn=9781124488899&rft.btitle=&rft.title=The+politics+of+eating+an
d+cooking+in+medieval+English+romance&rft.issn= 

Subject:  Medieval literature; British and Irish literature 

Classification: 0297: Medieval literature; 0593: British and Irish  
literature 

Identifier /  keyword: Language, literature and linguistics, Eating, 
Cooking, Romances, Middle  Ages 

Title: The  politics of eating and cooking in medieval English romance 

Number of  pages: 246 

Publication  year: 2011 

Degree date:  2011 

School code:  0181 

Source: DAI-A  72/04, Oct 2011 

Place of  publication: Ann Arbor 

Country of  publication: United States 

ISBN:  9781124488899 

Advisor:  Smith, D. Vance, Davis, Kathleen 

University/institution: Princeton University 

University  location: United States -- New Jersey 

Degree:  Ph.D. 

Source type:  Dissertations & Theses 

Language:  English 

Document  type: Dissertation/Thesis 

Dissertation/thesis number: 3445552 

ProQuest  document ID: 854862261 

Document URL:  http://pitt.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://searc
h.proquest.com/docview/854862261?accountid=14709 

Copyright:  Copyright ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing 2011 

Database:  ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text
Jim  Chevallier
 (http://www.chezjim.com/) www.chezjim.com

Les Leftovers: sort of a food history  blog
leslefts.blogspot.com