Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death. In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine. It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture.

Sie hat in Köln Anglistik, Germanistik und Slavistik studiert, war an der Universität Köln als Mitarbeiterin tätig und wurde dort 2000 in Anglistik promoviert. Danach folgte eine Tätigkeit als Koordinatorin des Internationalen Promotionsprogramms >Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft< und die Habilitation in Gießen.