Feeding Culture: The Pleasures and Perils of Appetite

There is no sapient question: to eat or not to eat? Eating comes before culture, but with culture it becomes more than just eating. It is with the purpose of exploring the relation between culture and consuming food – a relation far more complex than it might seem at first sight – that this book has been intended. In this sense, the book inscribes itself within that trend in cultural studies whose main objectives include the defamiliarization of the commonplace. While its subject matter is quite specific, the range of particular issues – apart from theoretical ones – involves different geo-cultural areas and different temporal environments: from Sri Lanka via Europe to South America, and from ancient Rome via medieval times to contemporary England. Likewise, the cultural realms in which food and eating appear as significant and meaningful components of reality range from fiction to practices of everyday life, from gender identity to eroticism, from economy to epistemology.

The Editors: Wojciech H. Kalaga is Professor of Literary Theory and English Literature at the University of Silesia, Poland, Chair of the Department of Literary and Cultural Theory and Director of the Institute of British and American Culture and Literature. He has published widely on literary and cultural theory and is also editor-in-chief of the literary journal Er(r)go. Tadeusz Rachwa? is Professor of English Literature at the Academy of Technical and Human Sciences in Bielsko, Poland, where he is also Chair of the Department of Anglophone Literatures. He has published extensively on labour and leisure in the 19th century.

: Tadeusz Rachwa? : Food and Labour. Eating Epistemology– Liliana Barako?ska: Of Foods and Books – David Schauffler: The Dialectic of Gluttony, or The Empty Stomach of Insatiable Reason – Tomasz Kalaga: Food for Thought: A Textual Feast – Leszek Drong: Flesh Made Spirit(s): Tips on How to Liquidate Oneself – Johan van Wyk: Spirits and the Discourse of Reason – Bradley Kadel: The Pub and the Irish Nation – Katarzyna Ancuta: Meat Hooks, Chain Saws and the aphysics of Horror – John Watters: The Manners of Mass Murder: Eating Fear – Carmen Concilio: Tran Anh Hung’s and Romesh Gunesekera’s : Two Stories of Emancipation Through the Art of Cooking Between Vietnam and Sri Lanka – John Simons: Vegetarianism and Citizenship: Some Thoughts on Britain Today – Aleksandra Podgórniak: Capirotada vs. Chicken Curry: Versions of Alchemical Realism in Ethnic American Fiction – Jacek Mydla: The Meat, the Sauce, the Ceremony: ’s Film Adaptations and Symbolic Metabolism – Rafa? Borys?awski: Sex, Food and Magic: Digestion and Fertility in the Exeter Book Riddles – Alice Weinreb: Taste No Evil: The Dangers of the Mouth In Ancient Rome.