A journey through texts on, about, or reflecting our experience of the natural world. What might it mean to study ideas of nature within our English literary heritage? In posing this question this volume invites us both to discover a diversity of ways of looking at a major continuing topos within English literature, and to ask what we mean by nature itself within this context. Starting from the premise of considering the pathetic fallacy which demands that nature reflects our emotional needs and beliefs as well as providing our material sustenance, the author explores the astonishing variety of themes grouped under the banner of "nature writing". Some chapters consider the broad distinctions of nature experienced as time and mortality for human beings, and nature perceived as "out there" in the local or larger environment; others demonstrate how nature is commandeered in the erotic pastoral lyrics of the Elizabethan sonneteers, how the concept of a "natural" family underpins the tragedy of King Lear, and how definitions of what is natural are used to validate dominion over women and animals as well as the earth itself. A literary heritage of nature is here envisaged as a polyphony of voices across the centuries in which English texts influence and are influenced by their continental and North American fellow-artists. The colonial preoccupations of the Elizabethan Sir Walter Ralegh are re-examined in the writings of the American nineteenth-century defender of nature David Henry Thoreau. The seventeenth-century Norfolk physician Sir Thomas Browne's musings begin and end the meditations by W.G. Sebald on his twentieth-century East Anglian pilgrimage in The Rings of Saturn. Mary Shelley's new genre of science fiction is turned upside down in Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. Ted Hughes translates Ovid. Seamus Heaney takes his inspiration from English, Irish and continental peers and predecessors. This polyphonic chorus of writing about nature has always enriched our literature and continues to do so. At the same it demonstrates how we have naturalised nature in our culture, as both a celebration, and an admonishment for what we take for granted in our attitudes to the natural world.

This volume explores the intersection between culinary history and literature across a period of profound social and cultural change. Split into four parts, essays focus on the relationships between eating and childhood reading in the Victorian era, the role of hunger in depicting social instability and reform, the cultivation of taste through advertising and the formation of cultural legacies through imaginative and emotional experiences of food and drink. Contributors show that studying consumption is necessary for a full understanding of class, gender, national identity and the body. The works of writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Lear, Isabella Beeton and Bram Stoker are considered alongside advice manuals, Home Front narratives and advertising to provide an innovative work that will be of interest to scholars of social, cultural and medical history as well as literary studies.

This volume explores the intersection between culinary history and literature across a period of profound social and cultural change. Split into four parts, essays focus on the relationships between eating and childhood reading in the Victorian era, the role of hunger in depicting social instability and reform, the cultivation of taste through advertising and the formation of cultural legacies through imaginative and emotional experiences of food and drink. Contributors show that studying consumption is necessary for a full understanding of class, gender, national identity and the body. The works of writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Lear, Isabella Beeton and Bram Stoker are considered alongside advice manuals, Home Front narratives and advertising to provide an innovative work that will be of interest to scholars of social, cultural and medical history as well as literary studies.

New insights into the changing human attitudes towards wild nature through the depiction of wolves in human culture and heritage. Few animals arouse such strong opinion as the wolf. It occupies a contested, ambiguous, yet central role in human culture and heritage. It appears as both an inspirational emblem of the wild and an embodiment of evil. Offering a mirror to different human attitudes, beliefs, and values, the wolf is, arguably, the species that plays the greatest role in shaping our views on what nature is or should be. North America and, more recently, Europe have witnessed a remarkable return of the grey wolf (Canis lupus, and its close relative the Eurasian wolf, Canis lupus lupus) to eco-systems. The essays collected here explore aspects of this recovery, and consider the history, literature and myth surrounding this iconic species. There are chapters on wolf taxonomy, including the coywolf, the red wolf, and the many faces of the dingo. We also meet the Tasmanian wolf and encounter Nazi Werewolves from Outer Space. The book explores the challenges of separating fact from fiction and superstition, and our willingness to co-exist with large carnivores in the twenty-first century. Biologists, historians, anthropologists, cultural theorists, conservationists and museologists will all find riches in the detail presented in this wolf collection.