1st Edition
Hunger Movements in Early Victorian Literature Want, Riots, Migration
Biography
Lesa Scholl is the Dean of Emmanuel College within the University of Queensland, Australia, and an Honorary Research Fellow with the University of Exeter, UK.
In our age of Effective Altruisms, eating disorders, sugar regulation, and a myriad of responses to global inequality, Lesa Scholl reminds us of what hunger was during the West’s modernization, and what it still may be. She explores key concepts and representations of want, moderation, excess; the dialectics of scarcity and plenty; sensory and aesthetic taste in early Victorian literature and the eclipsing of hunger by taste by the later nineteenth century. Her subtitle, Want, Riots, Migration, reminds us of the timeliness and significance of the topic and the inescapable interconnectedness of response: an historical work for our time.
Regenia Gagnier, University of Exeter and author of The Insatiability of Human Wants
"Lesa Scholl’s Hunger Movements tells the story of these bleak times through the lens of early Victorian writers and the pre-eminent political, social and economic thinkers of the age. Our modern world of excess seems far removed from the starvation caused by the potato blight and the catastrophic disruptions of the Industrial Revolution, but many of the human responses and emotions still resonate.
Its revelations on want, riots and migration gave interesting new perspectives that triggered fresh exploration of some near-forgotten Victorian classics." John Algate, Brisbane writer and journalist The Australian
