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  • “Wholesome Nutriment” for the Rising Generation: Food, Nationalism, and Didactic Fiction at the End of the Eighteenth Century
  • Lisa Wood (bio)

The Role of food in culture has become a fertile scholarly field during the past two decades. Building on the earlier structuralist works of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, and Roland Barthes, recent critics suggest that food, its production, and its consumption form a set of practices that can be read as signifying systems with meanings that are determined primarily by the cultural context in which they are practised. As the anthropologist Carole M. Counihan points out, “in every culture, food-ways constitute an organized system, a language that—through its structure and components—conveys meaning and contributes to the organization of the natural and social world.”1 This system works to produce and solidify group identity, and to mark the boundaries between social groups. In general, “people who eat strikingly different foods or similar foods in different ways are thought to be strikingly different, sometimes even less human.”2 This essay takes up and literalizes Counihan’s notion of food as “language,” by examining the uses of food as image and metaphor in writing of the late eighteenth century.

Writers at the end of the eighteenth century in Britain used food figuratively as a way of negotiating a number of cultural [End Page 615] and social issues, including gender, class, race, revolution, and nationalism. Significantly for my exploration here, writers also commonly used metaphors of food to figure the process of producing literature and, more importantly, the consumption of literature, especially by what was referred to as the “rising generation” (what we call “young adults” or “youth”).3 Here, I will focus on three of these areas. First, I will lay the groundwork for my argument by demonstrating that popular ideas about food can be identified across a range of texts and genres—including cookbooks, philosophy, and child-rearing manuals—and that these ideas constitute what Michel Foucault would call a “discursive formation,” or a set of ideas and practices that develops around a particular topic. Second, I will examine the ways in which literary consumption by young people is figured in terms of the consumption of food. Third, I will show how discourses around food construct and reinforce a form of patriotic nationalism in young readers of the late eighteenth century. The conceptual use of food that I examine here fulfilled a political function by defining the boundaries between nations through the identification of foreignness with exotic, unusual, or spicy cuisine. While writers throughout the eighteenth century used food as a way of constructing a notion of Britishness, the growth of bourgeois values, the increase in colonial trade, the development of Romantic ideas of nation, and the threat represented by the French Revolution combined at the end of the century to make such references standard, and symbolically overdetermined, in the didactic literature of the period. In my analysis, I draw on a range of late eighteenth-century didactic texts for young adults in order to show that the writers of these texts used food as a way to organize their understanding of both nation and literary consumption and to ensure the transmission of traditional values to the next generation of readers.4

In identifying the audience for “young adult” fiction of the Romantic period, I follow Sylvia Kasey Marks, who bases her [End Page 616] categorization of readers on Sarah Trimmer’s definition in Guardian of Education, the periodical Trimmer edited from June 1802 until September 1806, which “distinguishes between books for children, that is, those up to the age of fourteen, and those books that would be appropriate for young people, that is those up to the age of twenty-one.”5 Didactic fiction of the period represented the teenage years as a particularly vulnerable period for young people, who had moved beyond the protected space of childhood and had to make choices that could impact the rest of their adult lives. The fiction represented youth as a period in which young people’s agency had to be carefully balanced by parental protection and guidance, which countered the impressionability that many people believed youths shared...

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