Exploring the interplay between food, the body, and the mind, this book redefines the role of food in nineteenth-century French literature and medicine. It emphasizes food as an active agent in the complex relationships between human beings and their environment, rather than merely a social or cultural symbol. This fresh perspective invites readers to consider the intricate connections between gut health, mental states, and ecological factors in historical contexts.
This book considers the historical and cultural origins of the gut-brain relationship now evidenced in numerous scientific research fields. Bringing together eleven scholars with wide interdisciplinary expertise, the volume examines literal and metaphorical digestion in different spheres of nineteenth-century life. Digestive health is examined in three sections in relation to science, politics and literature during the period, focusing on Northern America, Europe and Australia. Using diverse methodologies, the essays demonstrate that the long nineteenth century was an important moment in the Western understanding and perception of the gastroenterological system and its relation to the mind in the sense of cognition, mental wellbeing, and the emotions. This collection explores how medical breakthroughs are often historically preceded by intuitive models imagined throughout a range of cultural productions.
In a culture increasingly obsessed with the visual, self-image and extreme self-exposure, in which reality is constantly obscured and misrepresented through concealment and spin, the roles display and disguise play in literature, thought and visual culture are particularly prescient. This collection, developed from papers presented at a postgraduate conference in Oxford in September 2008, presents a coherent view of key developments in the notions of display and disguise in French culture and provides a thought-provoking contribution to contemporary criticism. The volume includes essays from both senior researchers and graduate students using close readings and theoretical approaches from the psychoanalytic to the postcolonial. These are arranged in four main sections, dealing with notions of performance, disclosure, illusion and concealment respectively. Drawing on new research in a wide range of periods, in fields including art, photography, theatre, travel writing and the novel, the authors consider the notions of display and disguise in relation to works by artists such as Molière, Flaubert, Proust, Dalí, Vinaver and Sophie Calle. This volume contains ten contributions in English and one in French.
