From sustenance to resonance: Food as metaphorical identity in the nineteenth-century American novel.

摘要

“I don't believe they have the habit of wine at table. I suspect that when they don't drink tea or coffee with their dinner, they drink ice water.”; “Horrible!” said Bromfield Corey.; “It appears to me this defines them.” — The Rise of Silas Lapham; During the nineteenth century food emerges as a dynamic source of metaphor for nascent American identity in both major and popular novels. Focusing on the intersection of social change and narrative representation, I discuss American novels as interventions in the unprecedented changes in nineteenth-century culture. As technological and social developments change American foodways, novelists join other cultural commentators to encode these changes with social and even moral meaning. Drawing on the work of cultural critics as diverse as Lionel Trilling and Pierre Bourdieu and on theoretical approaches of other disciplines, I examine the way narrative representation participates in a cultural system that both encourages emulation and demands further refinement as foodways become increasingly central to class identification. These changes reorient the myth of republican simplicity in ways that revise conceptions of the national character.; The first chapter, “Introductions and Preparations: Studying Food in the Novel,” presents a theoretical framework for exploring the ways novelists engage in debates about food's cultural meaning. The second chapter, “‘He Sat Opposite Me at Table’: Culinary Stasis and Literary Sustenance,” surveys the study's cultural ground by examining early nineteenth-century Anglo-American culinary and literary traditions. In the third chapter, “Changing Tastes: Revolution on the Table, Renaissance on the Page,” I argue that the writers of sentimental fiction and domestic manuals construct a powerful metaphor linking culinary skill and moral character. The fourth chapter, “Developing Technique: Dining Out in the Novel,” examines the technological revolution in home kitchens and the rapid growth of modern restaurants; these concurrent developments shape the upperclass culinary habits that model entertaining styles for the middle classes in the Gilded Age. The resulting emphasis on food provides a rich source of tropes for novelists, and the final chapter, “Serve It Forth: Food and the Novel in America” offers a brief overview of these metaphors in early twentieth-century American novels.