Review: Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire, by Jessica Martell

Abstract

Book Review| December 01 2022 Review: Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire, by Jessica Martell Jessica Martell, Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2020. Pp. vi + 232. $55. Cailey Hall Cailey Hall Oklahoma State University Cailey Hall is Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. She has published essays in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 (2020) and Eighteenth-Century Life (2017). Her current project, tentatively titled “Gut Reading: Literature, Environmental Culture, and the Alimentary Body,” traces the relationships between environment, health, and identity during a time when agricultural and medical practices were modernizing and becoming standardized. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2022) 77 (2-3): 176–179. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2022.77.2-3.176 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Cailey Hall; Review: Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire, by Jessica Martell. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 December 2022; 77 (2-3): 176–179. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2022.77.2-3.176 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search The past several years of supply chain shortages and panic buying have offered a stark reminder of just how reliant many of us in so-called “developed” countries are on global supply chains. Such a realization might feel new—or at least newly urgent—to anyone who could not find legumes for the first six months of the pandemic, to say nothing of those who are still rationing infant formula. Reading Jessica Martell’s Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire offered me a well-timed reminder that these recent shortages are connected to a much longer history of global food chains. The book “presents the food history of the late British empire as an extended rehearsal for our era of industrial food supremacy,” in which imperial foodways have been replaced by “today’s multinational food corporations” (p. 3). Farm to Form focuses on modernist (or modernist-adjacent) novels, and how... You do not currently have access to this content.