Diet and Discourse: Eating, Drinking and Literature. Mosaic ed. by Evelyn J. Hinz

Abstract

astuteness with his avant garde humanism elevated the tone of Henry’s court, speaking to Henry’s need to be taken as an equal among Europe’s rulers. While each chapter explores a different aspect of the relationship between a humanist’s publication of his writings and their cultural and economic context, certain themes reappear and deepen. The chapter entitled “Autho­ rial Self-Fashioning,” centred around Bernard Andre’s later career, has an interesting discussion of why print became more important and more widely used by humanists, a discussion that is picked up from the other side in later chapters such as 5 and 6 — why English printers belatedly, that is not until about 1520, started printing humanist books. Another theme that comes up several times throughout English Humanist Books is republication, and one of the most interesting chapters, “Authorial Parsimony” on Erasmus, fo­ cusses on what changes in the form of publication did to reception, a theme also taken up in the Thomas More chapter. English Humanist Books forces its reader to re-examine assumptions about this crucial period in the history of English cultural life. Repeatedly, what Carlson demonstrates so ably is how much elements of writing beyond the sheer contents of the writer’s text contribute to the “meaning” of a book. m a r y v. silc o x / M cM aster University Evelyn J. Hinz, ed. and introd., Diet and Discourse: Eating, Drinking and Literature. Mosaic (Summer/Fall 1991). xiii, 266. The most successful essays in this issue of Mosaic devoted to the impact of food and drink on the literary imagination are those that apply their insights from other disciplines in a beguilingly direct and uncluttered manner. After all, most readers of Mosaic are presumably, like me, students of literature rather than of, say, contemporary communications theory, psychoanalytic theory, co-dependency addiction theory, etc. So it’s a relief to read essays that speak from these foreign climes in the language of a common, shared intellectuality rather than in the often mystifyingly dense, private language of their discipline’s expertise. Of course, these days it’s increasingly difficult, and probably undesirable, to read what gets designated as “literature” in the solitary splendour of aesthetic isolationism. Not to worry, for a concern for the aesthetic is con­ spicuously missing in this collection except insofar as anything that tells you something about the workings of any text enhances your enjoyment of it. So I tip my hat to the enhancive, “aestheticising” information in Carol Shiner Wilson’s essay on the culinary aesthetics of Byron’s Don Juan, Mary Burgan’s essay on the feeding of children in Dickens, Deborah Thompson’s 492 on anorexia and Christina Rossetti, R.J. Merrett’s on the politics of wine in Trollope, and, especially, Carol Dietrich’s piece on the role of fruit in modern poetry and Mervyn Nicholson’s essay “Eat or Be Eaten: An Interdisciplinary Metaphor.” All the essays in this collection focus on the undeniable fact that “all hu­ mans eat culturally,” as Dietrich puts it. “We eat before we talk,” Margaret Atwood says, so it’s not surprising that after having done something of such cultural primacy we should then want to talk about it. It’s equally unsur­ prising that the talk should come from both sides of the mouth (sometimes in the same essay), the one voice celebratory, the other castigating: at one extreme, Bakhtin’s notion that our “encounter with the world in the act of eating is joyful, triumphant,” at the other, the minatory world of Keats’s view of nature, “The shark at savage prey — the hawk at pounce” or, de­ scending the cultural ladder, of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney: “The history of the world, my sweet,/ Is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat.” Byron is someone who thought himself chronically eaten, so Carol Wilson tells us, “by predatory women, by hostile critics, by people hounding him for money, and by his own compulsion to devour food” (51). Nonetheless he too divides the eating world into the joyful and the minatory, or, in his terms, the “gourmet” and the “gourmand.” In Vassily Narezhny’s The Black Year, his opposing...