Tag Archives: agriculture

Beyond the Fruited Plain (2014)

Kathryn Cornell Dolan’s recent book, Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature 1850-1905 (2014) includes some fresh readings of major nineteenth-century American authors, and her work overlaps with some of the themes presented in “Sustainability and Population in American Literary History.” See below:

Agriculture in the United States has changed dramatically in the last two hundred years. Economic transformation marked by the expansion of the industrial economy and big business has contributed to an increase in industrial food production. Amid this change, policymakers and cultural critics have debated the best way to produce food and wealth for an expanding population with imperialistic tendencies.

In a sweeping overview, Beyond the Fruited Plain traces the connections between nineteenth-century literature, agriculture, and U.S. territorial and economic expansion. Bringing together theories of globalization and ecocriticism, Kathryn Cornell Dolan offers new readings on the texts of such literary figures as Herman Melville, Frank Norris, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as they examine conflicts of food, labor, class, race, gender, and time—issues still influencing U.S. food politics today.Beyond the Fruited Plain shows how these authors use their literature to imagine agricultural alternatives to national practices and in so doing prefigure twenty-first-century concerns about globalization, resource depletion, food security, and the relation of industrial agriculture to pollution, disease, and climate change.

Culinary Culture: The Politics of American Foodways, 1765-1900

The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA is hosting a CHAViC (Center for Historic American Visual Culture) Summer Seminar on “Culinary Culture: The Politics of American Foodways, 1765-1900.” The application deadline is March 20, 2015 and more details can be found here. 

Description:
The linking of food to politics became increasingly popular from the mid-eighteenth century on as a means to communicate caution or approval of political structures and ideologies in America. Whether the colonies were referred to as a cake or a kettle of fish, the domestic language of food was easily understood and often appeared in print and visual culture. This seminar examines how and why a culinary vocabulary and food imagery developed and was employed as a widespread (though little studied) method of political/cultural/visual expression. The seminar will commence with the years surrounding the Stamp Act, to the War for Independence, through the Civil War and Gilded Age, and concludes with current implications and questions to consider.

The Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) encourages and facilitates the use and understanding of popular images by scholars from a variety of disciplines including American studies, history, art and architectural history, English, gender studies, literature, religion, theatre, and environmental studies. The 2015 Summer Seminar, Culinary Culture: The Politics of American Foodways, 1765-1900, will be held Sunday, July 12 through Friday, July 17 at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA. The seminar is intended for college and university faculty as well as graduate students and museum professionals.

Through workshops, lectures, field trips, and cooking demonstrations participants will learn “how to look” by exploring an interdisciplinary approach to the study of American culinary culture as a means to understand the relationship among American foodways and evolving political, social, gender, public health, and economic ideologies through the 18th and 19th centuries. Participants will have the opportunity to learn from a wide variety of materials from the extraordinary collections at AAS including prints, cookbooks, political cartoons, broadsides, diaries, domestic manuals, newspapers, ceramics, ephemera of all kinds, botanical and horticultural illustrations/literature, children’s literature, and more.