Reviews copies’ (p. ). Chapter analyses illustrations, indicating an emphasis on kings and genealogy in insular manuscripts and de luxe illustrations in some continental manuscripts. e book concludes with a fascinating consideration of Merlin’s depiction in the Oldest and Long versions, and its implications for the understanding of history. e Oldest Version emphasizes Merlin’s wisdom and ingenuity, downplaying his supernatural aspects, while the Long Version emphasizes his prophetic powers. Marvin argues that the Long Version’s emphasis constructs a reader desirous of ‘more certitude than ordinary human observation of the world can supply’ while the Oldest Version represents history as a repository of past events that may, if interpreted properly, enable individuals to avoid the mistakes of the past (p. ). e Oldest Version suggests, however, that this repository demands active interpretation , with no guarantees that the interpreter will get it right or be heeded by those in power. is reflection on the appeals of history-reading, and of different versions of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut, makes a fitting conceptual conclusion, but does not provide an overview of the book’s contents; for that one must consult the Introduction. Marvin’s book is a vital guide to the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut, indicating the importance of its substantial manuscript corpus. e chapter introductions and conclusions admirably situate the reader within a mass of material. e Introduction helpfully details the book’s structure and scholarly importance, while the Conclusion promotes reflection on the differing ways in which history mattered to medieval readers. C U S B C Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde. Ed. by J M, A F, and P K G. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. . viii+ pp. $. ISBN ––– –. e Introduction to Modernism and Food Studies encourages the reader to approach the volume as ‘a buffet, sampling here and there, experiencing the novel combinations that would have been lost had these essays been published individually ’ (p. ). I ignored this advice and read the volume straight through, so my experience was more that of a tapas feast where the dishes are all ordered at once but arrive in clusters, as and when they are ready. e sections of this volume, ‘Aesthetics and the Body’, ‘Cookbooks’, ‘Globalization, Nationalism, and the Politics of Provenance’, ‘Rationing, Resistance, and Revolt’, and ‘Imagination and Exchange’, are deliberately named to ‘catch’ the key features of each individual essay and impose correspondences between groups of articles. ese sections, as with most edited collections, serve to illustrate the intellectual range of the volume, but they do not contain the individual articles they seek to describe. Every article in this volume speaks to every other article. MLR, ., Two different approaches are discernible—a historicist approach to food and food politics versus a more abstract view of food-as-metaphor—but in each approach the assumption is the same: the personal is political, and there is nothing more personal than food. us, Aimee Gasston’s article on Katherine Mansfield’s use of the humble egg as a ‘model for short fiction’ (p. ) and emblem ‘of creativity and freedom’ (p. ) in terms of feminist aesthetics and convenience speaks to Adam Fajardo’s article at the end of the book on Langston Hughes’s ‘playful’ use of chocolate as metaphor for racial identity (p. ). Both foodstuffs are evocative in terms of shape, texture, and colour as aesthetic metaphor, but both relate outwards to wider political and social structures. Gasston asks who eats eggs, and who cooks the eggs that are eaten; Fajardo asks who can afford to buy chocolate and what chocolate do they buy? e aesthetic and the political are never far from one another. Similarly, the rise of globalization with relation to food production is continually pertinent, even in those articles not arranged under the section title ‘Globalization, Nationalism, and the Politics of Revolt’. In the section on ‘Cookbooks’ Shannon Finck draws attention to Alice B Toklas’s writing of an indulgent French cuisine as alternative to American ‘moralistic dietics’ (p. ); Céline Mansanti travels in the reverse direction in her chapter on the journalistic coverage of ‘Futurist cooking’ in newspapers in the US, in which...
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Apr 30, 2024
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