The literature of food : an introduction from 1830 to present This book concerns itself with two sorts of foods: the real and the imagined and with their continually shifting relationship. This important new book is the first systematic study of the literature of food from the nineteenth century to the present covering a wide range of issues including the politics of food food as performance and its intersections with gender class disgust and erotics. Combining the insights of food studies and literary analysis the author demonstrates how the reading of food within texts can illuminate our reading of food outside them. Carefully designed and structured for use on the growing number of literature of food courses it considers the food of modernism post modernism crime fiction the realist novel and childrens literature and asks what happens when we treat cook books as literary texts