Leave it to a gourmet chef, food writer, and general woman-about-town to write an unpredictable and fascinating study of Victorians and their alimentary behaviors as displayed in their literature. Here we have food, drink, drugs, and whatever they could stuff into their mouths. The book is Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Gwen Hyman, an assistant professor of humanities at Cooper Union in New York, and the co-author of a recent cookbook, Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food. And it seems that those appetites were voracious indeed. The very act of eating, drinking and getting high, along with whatever else is left to the imagination, seems to be the very thing itself that makes a man a man in this world. And boys will be boys. Drawing on food history, theory, literary criticism, anthropology, economics, and social criticism, along with close readings of novels of the time, especially those of Jane Austen, Professor Hyman breaks it all down for endlessly uptight, gorging, anxious, and generally hot-and-bothered Victorian culture. In this world you really are what you eat.
You also have the monster metaphor, Count Dracula and his uncontrollable thirst for blood, and the men who obsessively hunt him down. There is the drawing room, the dining room, the opium den, and the cocaine lab as manifest sets where Victorian males act out their power and uneasiness. The act of consuming, or even starving himself, can be the hinges that make or break the nation. This is an innovative, thought-provoking, and meaningful social study of what it means to be Victorian, and offers an original thesis about the embodiment of power and how alimental behavior can make, unmake and even remake the man.
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