Eating and Becoming: Ethics and Poetics of Commensality from Donne to Milton

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

My research will trace the ethics and poetics of commensality, or eating together, in early modern English literature, examining in particular the relationship between aspiration and incorporation in the works of poets from Donne to Milton. Taking up David Goldstein's call for 'a new paradigm for philosophies of eating...that begins in the early modern mouth' and drawing on Maggie Kilgour's concepts of communion and cannibalism as categories of ethical relationality, my project will consider the place of eating in what Timothy Reiss calls the interlocking 'spheres' of selfhood by visiting four sites of commensality in early modern English literature: the altar, the book, the feast, and the garden. I will examine the eucharistic poetics of John Donne and George Herbert; the 'feeding relation' of literary influence in Henry Vaughan's incorporation of Herbert's poetics; conviviality and sociability in Jonson and Herrick's poetry of food and drink; and the ethics of hospitality towards a human host in country house poetry and towards God, the divine host, in Milton's Paradise Lost. Drawing out the underexplored relationships between eating, aspiration, and ethics in the early modern English imaginary, this project will be an attempt to reframe and so redefine the treatment of all three by the constellation of authors whom it takes as its subjects; it will, at the same time, open up avenues of interdisciplinary dialogue with the history of art, history of medicine, and theology.