Francesca Orestano – författare

The essays presented in Not just Porridge address both the scholar and the bold, adventurous cook. They offer the crumbs of what might be found in great and famous works of literature. Concocted in Italy by scholars of English and sifted through the judgement of the English editor, this volume traces a curious history of English literature, from the tasty and spicy recipes of the Middle Ages down to very recent times, threatened as they are by junk food and microwaved dinners. The authors of the essays have lingered on the threshold of the kitchen rather than in the library. Each chapter provides the recipes that best describe the writers involved, and their culinary times.

The essays presented in Not just Porridge address both the scholar and the bold, adventurous cook. They offer the crumbs of what might be found in great and famous works of literature. Concocted in Italy by scholars of English and sifted through the judgement of the English editor, this volume traces a curious history of English literature, from the tasty and spicy recipes of the Middle Ages down to very recent times, threatened as they are by junk food and microwaved dinners. The authors of the essays have lingered on the threshold of the kitchen rather than in the library. Each chapter provides the recipes that best describe the writers involved, and their culinary times.

This collection of essays stems from the conference ‘Nineteenth-Century Literature and Aesthetics’, which was held at the University of Milan in 2006 and organised by the editors of this volume. The interface between word and image covered in these essays embraces the fields of literature, architecture, painting, photography, music and art criticism. The authors stress the role of aesthetics in a number of contexts ranging from the early 1830s to the fin de siècle and beyond, as far as the last influences of Victorian taste on the early years of the twentieth century.During the nineteenth century the ancient interaction between literature and aesthetics was challenged and criticised by Martineau, Rossetti, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Beardsley, Cameron and Carroll, among others: their awareness of the complexity of visual perception problematised the existing categories of realism, artistic conventions, discourse of description, translation and representation.The essays cover almost a century of debate between literature and aesthetics. They focus on the intersection of word and image by emphasising transgressions in art hierarchies, forms and languages, which restyle existing categories and project them into new aesthetic dimensions beyond the conventional idea of the sister arts.

This volume shows how highly conscious Dickens was of words – of their meaning of course, and of the ideas they conjured up, but also of their very substance, texture, plasticity, visuality, and resonance, as well as their interactions with other words, and with their cultural environment. Each keyword is treated not as a semantic unit with a fixed meaning but rather as a flexible linguistic construct. Some keywords are just a word, a characteristic or even idiosyncratic lexical unit; some are treated as a load-bearing conceptual category or theme; some disintegrate into noise, complicating readers'' assumptions about what a keyword must be. The focus shifts from "word" at micro- to macro-levels of signification, at times denoting wider cultural usage. Dynamic relations, oppositions, correlations and overlappings result from these individualized reading journeys, creating unforeseen and rich systems of meaning.