Full Description
Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System marks a significant intervention into the field of literary food studies. Drawing on new work in world literature, cultural studies, and environmental studies, the essays gathered here explore how literary and cultural texts have represented and responded to the global food system from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Covering topics such as the impact of colonial monocultures and industrial agriculture, enclosure and the loss of the commons, the meatification of diets, the toxification of landscapes, and the consequences of climate breakdown, the volume ranges across the globe, from Thailand to Brazil, Cyprus to the Caribbean. Whether it is anxieties over imported meat in late Victorian Britain, labour struggles on Guatemalan banana plantations, or food dependency in Puerto Rico, the contributors to this volume show how fiction, poetry, drama, film, and music have critically explored and contributed to food cultures worldwide.
Contents
1. Introduction: Plotting the Crisis—World-Literature, World-Culture, and the World-Food-System.- Part I Imperial Appetites and the Development of the World-Food-System.- 2. Eat Meat Crave Repeat: H. Rider Haggard, Lost World Romance and the Global Growth of Britain's Meat Markets.- 3. Pain, Pleasure, and the World-Food-System: Plotting the Afterlife of the Plantation in the Poetry of Grace Nichols.- 4. "The Landscape Heaved with Unspeakable Terror": The Weird Presence of the World-Food-System in the Cultural Imaginaries of England and the Caribbean.- Part II Cash-Crops and Agricultural Monarchs.- 5. Laurie Lee in Cyprus: Scripting Propaganda, Productivity, and Peasant Labour.- 6. Plants in the Free World Garden: Revolution and Rice in Thai Literature.- 7. Fleeing Ilex Paraguariensis: Yerba Mate Plantations in Horacio Quiroga and Augusto Roa Bastos.- 8. "To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution": Dialectical Aesthetics in Miguel Ángel Asturias' Banana Trilogy (1950-1960).- Part III Consumed by Crisis.- 9. Alimentary Gothic: Horror, Puerto Rico and the World-Food-System.- 10. Made in Cod's Image: Food, Fuel, and World-Ecological Decline in Michael Crummey's Sweetland.- 11. White Flight from Planet Earth: Reading Race, Cheap Food, and Capitalism's Crisis State in Interstellar.
