This collection of essays covers the representation and practice of drinking a variety of beverages across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and North America. The case studies in this volume cover drinking culture from a variety of perspectives, including literature, history, anthropology and the history of medicine.

This collection of essays covers the representation and practice of drinking a variety of beverages across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and North America. The case studies in this volume cover drinking culture from a variety of perspectives, including literature, history, anthropology and the history of medicine.

Browsing through books and TV channels, we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death. In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bete humaine. It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food that this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture.

Mantic elements are manifold in the English drama of the Renaissance period: they are supernatural manifestations and have a prophetic, future-determining function within the dramatic plot, which can be difficult to discern. Addressing contemporaries of Shakespeare, this study interprets a representative number of revenge tragedies, among them The Spanish Tragedy, The White Devil, and The Revenger's Tragedy, to draw general conclusions about the use of mantic elements in this genre. The analysis of the cultural context and the functionalisation of mantic elements in revenge tragedy of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline era show their essential function in the construction of the plot. Mantic elements create and stimulate audience expectations. They are not only rhetoric decorum, but structural elements, and convey knowledge about the genre, the fate of which is determined by retaliation. An interpretation of revenge tragedy is only possible if mantic providentialism is taken into account.

In academic as well as in public debates, audiovisual media have often been accused of perpetuating gender stereotypes and of confronting viewers time and again with traditional role models and binary concepts of masculinity and femininity. In recent years, films, television series and music videos increasingly have shown women and men who transgress the traditional gender dichotomy. One of the central ideas behind this volume is the attempt to bring together explorations of 'gendering' in different audiovisual media. The contributions seek to explore in particular shifting constructions of femininity and masculinity and aim to provide further insight into the media- and genre-specific ways of constructing, perpetuating and challenging gender concepts in audiovisual media, taking into consideration the interplay of the different levels on which gendering occurs in them. Thus, two articles in the present volume address the processes of constructing, perpetuating and challenging notions of femininity and masculinity in music videos, while other contributions are dedicated to the analysis of gendering in films and/or TV series.