This book examines the role of food in the life and works of Thomas Hardy, analysing the social, political and historical context of references to meals, eating and food production during the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how Hardy's personal relationship to the 'rustic' food of his childhood provides the impetus for his fiction, and provides a historical breakdown of the key factors which influenced food regulation and production from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the fin de siecle. This study explores how a sub-textual narrative of food references in The Trumpet-Major and Under the Greenwood Tree captures the instability of the pre-industrial era, and how food and eating act as a means of delineating and exploring 'character' and 'environment' in The Mayor of Casterbridge. As well as this, it considers rural femininity and the myth of the feminine pastoral in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and charts the anxieties brought about by the shift in population from a rural to a predominantly urban one and its impact on food production in Jude the Obscure.

This book is about the role of food in the works of Joseph Conrad, analysing the social, political and anthropological context of references to meals, eating, food production and cannibalism. It offers a new perspective on the works of Joseph Conrad and provides an accessible medium through which readers can engage with the complex theories and philosophical dilemmas that Conrad presents in his fiction. This is the only major study of food in Conrad's works; it is unique in its interdisciplinary approach to food in that it engages with sociological, political, historical, personal and literary perspectives, thus providing a multi-dimensional approach to cultural, revolutionary, periodical and fictional representations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This in turn, allows an interrogation of modern anxieties, embedded in cultural norms and values that can be interpreted through the way that food is prepared and eaten.

Examining the notion of migration and transnationalism within the life and work of Joseph Conrad, this book situates the multicultural and transnational characters that comprise his fiction while locating Conrad as a subject of the Russian state whose provenance is Polish, but whose identity is that of a merchant sailor and English country gentleman. Conrad's characters are often marked by crossings - changes of nation, changes of culture, changes of identity - which refract Conrad's own cultural transitions. These crossings not only subjectivise the experience of the migrant through the modern complexities of technology and speed, but also through cross-cultural encounters of food and language. Collectively, these essays explore the experience of the migrant as exile; the inescapable intermeshing of migration, modernity and transnationalism as well as Conrad's own global and multicultural outlook. Conrad's work writes across historical, political and ethnic borders speaking to a transnational reality that continues to have relevance today.

This book is about the role of food in the works of Joseph Conrad, analysing the social, political and anthropological context of references to meals, eating, food production and cannibalism. It offers a new perspective on the works of Joseph Conrad and provides an accessible medium through which readers can engage with the complex theories and philosophical dilemmas that Conrad presents in his fiction. This is the only major study of food in Conrad's works; it is unique in its interdisciplinary approach to food in that it engages with sociological, political, historical, personal and literary perspectives, thus providing a multi-dimensional approach to cultural, revolutionary, periodical and fictional representations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This in turn, allows an interrogation of modern anxieties, embedded in cultural norms and values that can be interpreted through the way that food is prepared and eaten.

Examining the notion of migration and transnationalism within the life and work of Joseph Conrad, this book situates the multicultural and transnational characters that comprise his fiction while locating Conrad as a subject of the Russian state whose provenance is Polish, but whose identity is that of a merchant sailor and English country gentleman. Conrad's characters are often marked by crossings - changes of nation, changes of culture, changes of identity - which refract Conrad's own cultural transitions. These crossings not only subjectivise the experience of the migrant through the modern complexities of technology and speed, but also through cross-cultural encounters of food and language. Collectively, these essays explore the experience of the migrant as exile; the inescapable intermeshing of migration, modernity and transnationalism as well as Conrad's own global and multicultural outlook. Conrad's work writes across historical, political and ethnic borders speaking to a transnational reality that continues to have relevance today.