Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the preponderance of food imagery in nineteenth-century literary texts. Contributors to this volume analyze the social, political, and cultural implications of scenes involving food and dining and illustrate how "aesthetic" notions of culinary preparation are often undercut by the actual practices of cooking and eating. As contributors interrogate the values and meanings behind culinary discourses, they complicate commonplace notions about American identity and question the power structure behind food production and consumption.

MONIKA ELBERT is Professor of English at Montclair State University, USA. MARIE DREWS is Professor of English at Washington State University, USA.

PART I: CULINARY ETIQUETTE AND CAPITALISTIC APPETITES: CONSUMPTION AND ECONOMIES OF FOOD Imagined Communities: Susan Warner and the Economics of Food; H.Hoeller Suburban Men at the Table: Culinary Aesthetics in the Mid-Century Country Book; M.D'Amore Conspicuous Consumption: Howells, James, and the Gilded Age Restaurant; M.McWilliams Cannibalism and Capitalism in the Altrurian Romances of William Dean Howells; L.Rubin PART II: COOKING UP A STORM: POWER DYNAMICS IN FOOD NARRATIVES Whale as Dish: Culinary Rhetoric and the Discourse of Power in Moby-Dick; R.Tally Domestic Discomfort and Dinner Table Shenanigans: Catharine Beecher Dines in with  Our Nig; M.Drews 'Bonbons in abundance': The Politics of Sweetness in Kate Chopin's Fiction; A.Dix& L.Piatti 'You don't know what a good manager I could be': Managing Class and Consumerism in Catherine Owen's Cookbook Novels; K.Cohen PART III: PALATABLE VIRTUES: MODELS OF CITIZENSHIP AND THE NATIONAL CUISINE Doughnuts and Gingerbread, Apples andPears: Boyhood Food Economies in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Series Books For Children; L.Cohoon The Kitchen as Moral Territory; K.Sloan Food for Thought: Dinnertable Discourse, Dyspepsia, and Hawthorne's Ruminations on Old and New England; M.Elbert The Edible Book: White Female Sexuality and Novel Reading; C.LeFavour PART IV: MAN DOES NOT LIVE ON BREAD ALONE: THE PARADOX OF SPIRITUAL NOURISHMENT Searching for Eupepsia: Bronson Alcott, the Hunger Artist; R.Bellin Strawberries and Salt: Food Preparation as Moral Education in Alcott's Little Women; Y.Pelletier ' This foreshadowed Food': Representations of Food and Hunger in Emily Dickinson's American Gothic'; E.Andrews Austin's Consuming 'Desertness' in The Land of Little Rain; B.Hume