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Palgrave Macmillan
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Food in the Novels of Thomas Hardy

Production and Consumption

  • Book
  • © 2017

Overview

Authors:
  1. Kim Salmons

    1. St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, United Kingdom

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  • Represents the only book to focus solely on food in the novels of Thomas Hardy

  • Contributes to the emergent and increasingly important critical field of Food Studies

  • Provides a new perspective on the cultural and historical context of Hardy's novels

  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Kim Salmons
    Pages 1-12

  3. Historical Context

    • Kim Salmons
    Pages 13-36

  4. Undermining the ‘Pastoral Idyll’: The Trumpet-Major and Under the Greenwood Tree

    • Kim Salmons
    Pages 37-64

  5. The Decline and Fall of the Corn King: The Mayor of Casterbridge

    • Kim Salmons
    Pages 65-83

  6. Food Production and the Feminine Pastoral: Tess of the d’Urbervilles

    • Kim Salmons
    Pages 85-103

  7. Pig Killing and Surviving Modernity: Jude the Obscure

    • Kim Salmons
    Pages 105-119

  8. Conclusion

    • Kim Salmons
    Pages 121-124

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 125-133
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Keywords

About this book

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 siècle. 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.

Authors and Affiliations

  • St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, United Kingdom

    Kim Salmons

About the author

Kim Salmons is Lecturer at St Mary’s University, UK. Her publications include Food in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Eating as Narrative (Palgrave, 2017). She has presented widely on the subject of food in modern literature and was previously Assistant Commissioning Editor on the Arts desk of the Observer newspaper.

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