Skip to main content
Kent Academic Repository

Spilling the Beans: Reading, Writing, Eating and Cooking in British Women’s Fiction 1770 – 1840

Moss, Sarah K. (2009) Spilling the Beans: Reading, Writing, Eating and Cooking in British Women’s Fiction 1770 – 1840. Manchester University Press, UK, 224 pp. ISBN 978-0-7190-7651-0. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:6819)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.

Abstract

The study of food in literature complicates established critical positions. Both a libidinal pleasure and the ultimate commodity, food in fiction can represent sex as well as money and brings the body and the marketplace together in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes unsettling. Spilling the Beans explores these relations in the context of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century women's fiction, where concerns about bodily, economic and intellectual productivity and consumption power decades of novels, conduct books and popular medicine. The introduction suggests ways in which attention to food in these texts might complicate recent developments in literary theory and criticism, while the body of the book is devoted to close readings of novels and children's stories by Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and Susan Ferrier. Burney and Wollstonecraft explore the ways in which eating and not eating (mis)represent women's sexuality, and consider how women's intellectual and economic productivity might disrupt easy equations between appetites at the table and in bed. Edgeworth and Ferrier, the Anglo-Irish and the Scottish writer, are more interested in cooking and eating as ways of enacting and manipulating national identity and class. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, women's studies and material culture.

Item Type: Book
Subjects: P Language and Literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User: J.P.W. Joseph
Date Deposited: 19 Oct 2009 14:39 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 09:45 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/6819 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Moss, Sarah K..

Creator's ORCID:
CReDIT Contributor Roles:
  • Depositors only (login required):

Total unique views for this document in KAR since July 2020. For more details click on the image.