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This book examines the phenomenon of the rise and fall of the Irish Celtic Tiger from a cultural perspective. It looks at Ireland's regression from prosperity to austerity in terms of a society as opposed to just an economy. Using literary and cultural theory, it looks at how this period was influenced by, and in its turn influenced, areas such as religion, popular culture, politics, literature, photography, gastronomy, music, theatre, poetry and film. It seeks to provide some answers as to what exactly happened to Irish society in the past few decades of boom and bust. The socio-cultural rather than the purely economic lens it uses to critique the Celtic Tiger is useful because society and culture are inevitably influenced by what happens in the economic sphere. That said, all of the measures taken in the wake of the financial crash sought to find solutions to aid the ailing economy, and the social and cultural ramifications were shamefully neglected. The aim of this book therefore is to bring the ‘Real’ of the socio-cultural consequences of the Celtic Tiger out of the darkness and to initiate a debate that is, in some respects, equally important as the numerous economic analyses of recent times. The essays analyse how culture and society are mutually-informing discourses and how this synthesis may help us to more fully understand what happened in this period, and more importantly, why it happened.
guaranteed. So successful was this reputation that we exported the culture of that ‘Céad Míle Fáilte’ (a hundred thousand welcomes) across the world. People from Ireland were commonly believed to possess an inherent aptitude for hospitality and service. Because of this, the Irish have become prominent in all aspects of the hospitality and tourism industry on the international stage. During the Celtic Tiger years, both Ireland’s gastronomic culture and the story of Irish hospitality changed dramatically. Our distinctive service culture began to decline and Ireland was no
like to consider the role of eating in Burney’s performance and reporting of her public, authorial persona, moving on to contrast this detailed reportage of mouthfuls and recipes with her fictional heroines’ unremitting lack of interest in sustenance or gastronomy. ‘She don’t care what she eats; she cares for nothing but books, and such kind of things,’ Indiana tells Clermont of Eugenia, thereby revealing her own triviality and Eugenia’s moral and intellectual superiority. 5 Burney, staying at Streatham Park, recounts excitedly, ‘we have not once missed a pine apple
This chapter considers the two books that were published at the beginning of the new millennium. Jim Crace particularises issues of love, family and other intimate or domestic interpersonal relations in The Devil's Larder and Six (2003). Of The Devil's Larder, some of whose stories had appeared previously in Slow Digestions of the Night, Crace admits the project was long planned, and represents ‘an attempt at a piecemeal, patchwork novel’, something inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Primo Levy's The Periodic Table. In Crace, the short pieces at times feel like narrative equivalents of philosophic aphorisms, particularly with their broadly common gastronomic themes and the implicit architectonic of an overriding cumulative intention. Generally, the recurrent contexts and themes are overt and therefore easy to identify, and include: relationships, sexuality and desire; families and their patterns of behaviour and traditions; sociability, jollity and its absence; and forms of poisoning or allergies.
12 Le Roi Bombance: the original Futurist cookbook? Selena Daly Selena Daly Le Roi Bombance The themes of nutrition and digestion fascinated Filippo Tommaso Marinetti for much of his career. The beginnings of this interest can be traced to his pre-Futurist play Le Roi Bombance, published in 1905, in which the eponymous obese king is concerned only with satisfying his enormous appetite. Marinetti’s most famous discussion of gastronomy and gastronomic habits came in 1932 with the publication of La cucina futurista, which was a development of the Manifesto della
, nevertheless, not voiced by the remaining participants, who describe how their culinary practices and tastes have evolved following exposure to the multitude of ingredients, flavours and cultural traditions encountered in the London habitat. They comment favourably on London’s gastronomic ‘progress’ since the turn of the century and on their new-found culinary audacity, understood as an expression of the cosmopolitanising effect of the city. Just as the English have fondly adopted Indian curry as a ‘national’ dish, so London’s French residents have grown accustomed to
outline the activities of the Slow Food Movement, a group that works to link a gastronomic aesthetic to local and traditional foods. Second, by considering the activities of the Soil Association, an organic food network, we illustrate how environmental qualities can be promoted. Third, we outline how socio-economic considerations are chap 7 13/8/04 4:17 pm Page 159 A new aesthetic of food? 159 brought to bear in the Fair Trade Movement. We argue that these three examples serve to illustrate how social movements mobilise a new sensibility towards particular
relating to the body and how it might react to unfamiliar climates and diets. While the privateers of the 1560s had largely ignored the Indigenous populations, for Frobisher and his men the bodies of the supposedly deformed Inuit, and their apparently atrocious diets and poor gastronomical techniques, exemplified the detrimental effects that environment and food could have on Indigenous and English bodies alike. The inability to source appropriate food would leave the bodies of the English severely weakened, if not irrevocably altered, making permanent English
significant authority over their domestic religious performances, and in Anglican Virginia, that authority unsettled clerics. For example, elite Virginians celebrated Christmas with huge parties accompanied by much food and drink. Clergymen looked askance at these great feasts, and encouraged Virginia laypeople to tamp down their rather raucous domestic and gastronomic celebrations of the
their delicate equilibrium and digestive function into disorder. Testifying from experience of vertiginous weight-gain, the obese Cheyne averred that although ‘almost all of our Diseases proceed from too much and too strong Meats and Drinks’, social miscibility insisted that fellows ‘Eat lustily, and swallow down much Liquor’ to prove their good humour and conviviality, even though the frequent ‘Dining and Supping’ demanded by urban clubbability was perilous.11 If the stomach was expected to be gastronomically accommodating, habitual over-indulgence was recognised as