This lectures invites students to study central texts of English literature, from the Renaissance to our postcolonial present, in view of the many ways in which these texts engage with practices of food, i.e. cooking, eating, banqueting and other ways of cultural consumption.

Eating is not (just) a biological necessity, but a cultural engagement that determines or produces social meaning. As anthropologists have long established, cooking and consuming food may thus define foundations of communal culture, negotiate gender relations and perform or contest rituals of belonging. More recently, literary studies have also turned towards such issues to explore how eating culture centrally informs many well-known novels, plays or poems which make and mark their points in culinary terms.

Including also film and perhaps other media of cultural representation, this lecture sets out to provide a survey of English literature, from the 16th to the late 20th century (and possibly beyond), from the perspective of food studies. Texts to be discussed include Shakespearean and Renaissance drama, metaphysical and Georgic poetry, Victorian, modernist and postcolonial fiction. Topics include the changing diets in English society, the impact of colonial consumer goods like sugar or tea, the function of banqueting and conspicuous consumption, spices and exotic pleasures, cannibalism and vampyrism, food pornography and cook books. In this way, the lecture also aims to give an introduction to the field of Cultural Studies, trying to place literature into some wider contexts in which it also operates.