Sure to rise: reading the Edmonds cookery book as a popular icon

Cookbooks are one of a variety of written forms that can be read as historical documents, functioning as testaments to individual, familial and cultural development. In the recipe, one can find a sense of culinary preference which simultaneously shapes and is shaped by a sense of belonging and identity. The (post-) colonial past of countries such as New Zealand and Australia allows a particular view into reading cookery books as chronicles of everyday life as well as an archive of cultural memory, uses and popular customs. Starting from the premise that cookbooks can function as a site for heritage and identity, this paper addresses the status of the Edmonds cookery kook as a popularised national icon. Now an established presence within New Zealand’s culinary culture, the Edmonds collection – first published in 1908 as The sure to rise cookery book – has evolved over the decades to include new and updated recipes, mirroring the cultural and socio-historical moment in which it was placed. With this in mind, I analyse how cookbook writing can be interpreted as a national practice which owes a lot of its success to pervasive links to popular culture. My paper also offers a critical framework which highlights the material conditions – historical, aesthetico-political and socio-cultural – that encouraged the rise and popularity of the Edmonds cookbook within an expanding national readership

Towards multisensory storytelling with taste and flavor

Film makers, producers, and theaters have continuously looked at ways to embody and/or integrate multiple sensory cues in the experiences they deliver. Here, we present a reflection on past attempts, lessons learnt, and future directions for the community around multisensory TV, film, and multimedia as a historical, though renewed, space of content creation. In particular, we present an overview of what we call "tasty film", that is, film involving taste, flavor, and more broadly food and drink inputs, to influence the audience experience. We suggest that such elements should be considered beyond "add-ons" in film experiences. We advocate for experimentation with new kinds of storytelling taking inspiration from multisensory design research and work on sensory substitution. We position this article as a starting point for anyone interested in multisensory film involving taste, flavor, and foods

Sites for contemporary Gothic

No abstract

Vampires in the city: mergence, mystique, and ‘The New Orleans Thing’

No abstract

Writing death and the gothic

Brien, DL ORCiD: 0000-0002-9005-3645This special issue of TEXT brings together a series of articles on the topic of ‘Writing death and the Gothic’, many of which have been developed from papers presented at the inaugural Australasian Death Studies Network conference, which was held in Noosa, Queensland, in October 2015

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food

Brien, DL ORCiD: 0000-0002-9005-3645The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food explores the relationship between food and literature in transnational contexts, serving as both an introduction and a guide to the field in terms of defining characteristics and development. Balancing a wide-reaching view of the long histories and preoccupations of literary food studies, with attentiveness to recent developments and shifts, the volume illuminates the aesthetic, cultural, political, and intellectual diversity of the representation of food and eating in literature

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food

Brien, DL ORCiD: 0000-0002-9005-3645The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food explores the relationship between food and literature in transnational contexts, serving as both an introduction and a guide to the field in terms of defining characteristics and development. Balancing a wide-reaching view of the long histories and preoccupations of literary food studies, with attentiveness to recent developments and shifts, the volume illuminates the aesthetic, cultural, political, and intellectual diversity of the representation of food and eating in literature

Writing death and the gothic

This special issue of TEXT brings together a series of articles on the topic of ‘Writing death and the Gothic’, many of which have been developed from papers presented at the inaugural Australasian Death Studies Network conference, which was held in Noosa, Queensland, in October 2015

New directions in 21st century gothic : the gothic compass

This book brings together a carefully selected range of contemporary disciplinary approaches to new areas of Gothic inquiry