In this groundbreaking book, Jessica Martell investigates the
relationship between industrial food and the emergence of literary
modernisms in Britain and Ireland. By the early twentieth century,
the industrialization of the British Empire's food system had
rendered many traditional farming operations, and attendant
agrarian ways of life, obsolete. Weaving insights from modernist
studies, food studies, and ecocriticism, Farm to Form contends that
industrial food made nature "modernist," a term used as literary
scholars understand it stylistically disorienting, unfamiliar, and
artificial but also exhilarating, excessive, and above all, new.
Martell draws in part upon archives in the United Kingdom but also
presents imperial foodways as an extended rehearsal for the current
era of industrial food supremacy. She analyzes how pastoral mode,
anachronism, fragmentation, and polyvocal narration reflect the
power of the literary arts to reckon with, and to resist, the new
"modernist ecologies" of the twentieth century. Deeply informed by
Martell's extensive knowledge of modern British, Irish, American,
and World Literatures, this progressive work positions modernism as
central to the study of narratives of resistance against social and
environmental degradation. Analyzed works include those of Thomas
Hardy, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, George
Russell, and James Joyce. In light of climate change, fossil fuel
supremacy, nutritional dearth, and other pressing food issues,
modernist texts bring to life an era of crisis and anxiety similar
to our own. In doing so, Martell summons the past as a way to
employ the modernist term of "defamiliarizing" the present so that
entrenched perceptions can be challenged. Our current food regime
is both new and constantly evolving with the first industrial food
trades. Studying earlier cultural responses to them invites us to
return to persistent problems with new insights and renewed
passion.
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