Abstract
Nineteenth-Century British literature maintains a complex relationship with food, where the latter functions as a potent signifier for situations and identities. Interactions with food seemingly take on more narrative significance when gothic motifs are present. Focusing on notions of hunger and “otherness”, this chapter discusses Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and how descriptions of food and eating in these novels symbolically convey character and status, while emphasising difference and unfamiliarity. In particular, these texts depict strange and incongruous appetites, and demonstrate Gothicised unruly dining habits and behaviours. Moreover, it becomes apparent that in moments of subversion and contradiction in eating and appetite, certain characters are positioned as “other” and beyond the bounds of proper Victorian values.
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Cedro, C., Piatti-Farnell, L. (2021). Food, Eating, Appetite and Otherness. In: Bloom, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_18
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