Food and Culture in the Works of Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf: Culinary Civilizations (Oxford English Monographs)

Writing about food has long been a part of autobiographical expression that combines culinary record-keeping and histories, drawing on the personal and the cultural. Concentrating on the transatlantic work of Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, this book illuminates modernist uses of the terms 'civilization' and 'barbarism', showing how these concepts are shaped by the rules of preparing and eating food in literature and in public. Nanette O'Brien introduces the concept of 'culinary Impressionism' as an extension and repositioning of current scholarly thinking about Ford's literary Impressionism and his synesthetic writing about cookery and small farming. She also presents a new reading of Stein's crafting of her modernist authority as interlinked with her cooks, and shows Stein's and Toklas's jointly authored unpublished cookbook draft as evidence of their direct authorial collaboration and of Stein adapting domestic culinary techniques into her other writing. O'Brien goes on to present new archival research demonstrating that Virginia Woolf's representation of the financial and culinary difference between men's and women's dining in colleges at the University of Cambridge is justified and the material inequality was in fact worse than previously understood. This disparity in institutional food intensifies Woolf's later reimagining of the term 'civilization'. While drawing on themes of modernism and life-writing, the everyday, domestic life and gender, the book argues that food is a vehicle for positive modernist re-conceptions of civilization. Cover Food and Culture in the Works of Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf: Culinary Civilization Copyright Dedication Table of Contents Acknowledgements List of illustrations List of Table Introduction Civilization, barbarism, and history Defining ‘civilization’ and the hierarchies of taste Barbarism and primitivism: an aesthetics of the body Culinary nations Chapter I: Cultures of Food and Eating General changes Transatlantic diet-reformfads Dining Out Industrialization Britain and the home Aesthetics of food in the 1920s and 1930s: Bloomsbury still lifes British art in cookbooks and restaurants British diet: beef and rationing American diet and agriculture Agricultural idealism French cuisine and tradition Chapter II: Culinary Impressionism: Ford Madox Ford’s Agrarianism and Cookery Variations on Impressionism Legacies of civilization and barbarism: utopias of past, present, and future The individual in an agrarian utopia: The Simple Life Limited and Ancient Lights Dining in the metropolis: the aesthetics of contradiction and digestion Civilized France: Mirrored Impressions and ‘finish’ Rising up: shallot skins and scum in Ford’ spost-war transformation Emotional eating: relationships, character, and food in The Good Soldier and the Parade’s End tetralogy Bouillabaisse: the allure of the Provençal The triumph of the small producer: an argument for an agrarian world culture Chapter III: Serving the Meals: Gertrude Stein and Domesticity Domesticity and nation, tradition, civilization ‘Hélène’: the ‘supercook’ ‘Servants are humans’: a dispiriting employment for American servants Ventriloquism and domestic creation in Three Lives The ‘other’ servants: foreignness, desire, the master/servant dynamic Domestic space in Tender Buttons: re-envisioning the everyday Stein’s lecture tour: culinary language and American homes ‘We Eat’: a collaborative cookbook Chapter IV: Apples and Kitchens: The Aesthetics and Politics of Modern Dining in Virginia Woolf Bloomsbury definitions of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ Part I: Caterpillars in the cauliflower, critique in the archives: from domestic to institutional food Woolf and the public sphere Institutional food Lunches and no leftovers: gender and Cambridge food in Jacob’s Room Recording the meals: Cambridge food in A Room of One’s Own Oxbridge/King’s College Newnham College and Girton College Part II: Civilization and barbarism in modern dining Cooking below: women and servants Food in the crowded city Disgust in the restaurant: the barbarism of modern dining Cream and sugar? Serving refreshments and performing community in Between the Acts and ‘Sketch of the Past’ Conclusion: Cooking Civilization, Tasting Modernism Bibliography Index Writing about food has long been a part of autobiographical expression that combines culinary record-keeping and histories, drawing on the personal and the cultural. Concentrating on the transatlantic work of Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, this book illuminates modernist uses of the terms 'civilization' and 'barbarism', showing how these concepts are shaped by the rules of preparing and eating food in literature and in public. Nanette OʼBrien introduces the concept of 'culinary Impressionism' as an extension and repositioning of current scholarly thinking about Ford's literary Impressionism and his synesthetic writing about cookery and small farming. She also presents a new reading of Stein's crafting of her modernist authority as interlinked with her cooks, and shows Stein's and Toklas's jointly authored unpublished cookbook draft as evidence of their direct authorial collaboration and of Stein adapting domestic culinary techniques into her other writing. OʼBrien goes on to present new archival research demonstrating that Virginia Woolf's representation of the financial and culinary difference between men's and women's dining in colleges at the University of Cambridge is justified and the material inequality was in fact worse than previously understood. This disparity in institutional food intensifies Woolf's later reimagining of the term 'civilization'. While drawing on themes of modernism and life-writing, the everyday, domestic life and gender, the book argues that food is a vehicle for positive modernist re-conceptions of civilization.