Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System

“This brilliant, broad-ranging volume brings together a novel constellation of theoretical perspectives, uniting world-systems and world-ecology approaches to literature with those of food studies and environmental humanities. It is extremely timely—responding to global crises of food security and concerns about the ecological sustainability of the neoliberal world food-system in the era of climate change. … This book will be a seminal text within the intersecting disciplines of food studies, world-literary criticism, and environmental humanities.”

—Sharae Deckard, Lecturer in World Literature, University College Dublin, Ireland

Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System marks a significant intervention into the field of literary food studies. Drawing on new work in world literature, cultural studies, and environmental studies, the essays gathered here explore how literary and cultural texts have represented andresponded to the global food system from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Covering topics such as the impact of colonial monocultures and industrial agriculture, enclosure and the loss of the commons, the meatification of diets, the toxification of landscapes, and the consequences of climate breakdown, the volume ranges across the globe, from Thailand to Brazil, Cyprus to the Caribbean. Whether it is anxieties over imported meat in late Victorian Britain, labour struggles on Guatemalan banana plantations, or food dependency in Puerto Rico, the contributors to this volume show how fiction, poetry, drama, film, and music have critically explored and contributed to food cultures worldwide.

Chris Campbell is Senior Lecturer in Global Literatures at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the co-editor of What is the Earthly Paradise? Ecocritical Responses to the Caribbean (2007) and The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology,Politics (2016). 

Michael Niblett is Associate Professor in Modern World Literature at the University of Warwick, UK. His previous books include World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890—1950 (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and The Caribbean Novel since 1945 (2012).

Kerstin Oloff is Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Durham, UK. She writes on Caribbean and Latin American literature, gothic and monstrous aesthetics, world-literature, and ecocriticism.