Austerity Measures

"This book explores how early modern writers used poetry to fight food insecurity. Authors like Robert Herrick and Anne Bradstreet witnessed the privatization of public farmland, rising food prices amidst uncontrolled inflation, mass starvation in nascent North American colonies, and the racist violence of the Caribbean plantation slavery system. Anders M. Greene-Crow shows how these authors' experiments with literary form sought to change their readers' eating habits and beliefs about food and diet. Simultaneously, this book reveals why criticism began to discount literature's power as a tool for social change, connecting the political history of New Criticism to close reading practices that reinforce the scarcity culture of literature departments today. Taking writers' material conditions into account in analyzing form, this book recovers the role of one of our most basic needs-the need to eat-within literary criticism, shedding new light on modern-day food ethics and activism's place in literature"--