Food and the Literary Imagination (or FLI, as we call it for brevity’s sake) went to press at the beginning of September 2014. It should be published before the end of this year. Here’s a brief synopsis:

Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley and Howard Thomas: Food and the Literary Imagination (London: Palgrave, 2014)

People, international agencies and governments are increasingly concerned about the nature of our food, where it comes from, and the conditions in which it is produced. By close reading of a wide sweep of historical literature, including works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats and George Eliot, FLI shows that such anxieties are nothing new, and that we are not confronting them alone. Too often, we engage with our rural, worked environments through the lens of apparently sentimental and incidental literary representations. The book recovers lost understandings of the materiality of life and sustenance for the authors and their first readers.