Gluttony
"In Gluttony, Francine Prose serves up a marvelous banquet of witty and engaging observations on this most delicious of deadly sins. She traces how our notions of gluttony have evolved along with our ideas about salvation and damnation, health and illness, life and death. Offering a lively smorgasbord that ranges from Augustine's Confessions and Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, to Petronius' Satyricon and Dante's Inferno, she shows that gluttony was in medieval times a deeply spiritual matter, but to…
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- Full title :Gluttony / Francine Prose.
Summary
"In Gluttony, Francine Prose serves up a marvelous banquet of witty and engaging observations on this most delicious of deadly sins. She traces how our notions of gluttony have evolved along with our ideas about salvation and damnation, health and illness, life and death. Offering a lively smorgasbord that ranges from Augustine's Confessions and Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, to Petronius' Satyricon and Dante's Inferno, she shows that gluttony was in medieval times a deeply spiritual matter, but today we have transformed gluttony from sin into an illness - it is the horrors of cholesterol and the perils of red meat that we demonize. Indeed, the modern take on gluttony is that we overeat out of compulsion, self-destructiveness, or to avoid intimacy and social contact. But gluttony, Prose reminds us, is also an affirmation of pleasure and of passion. She ends the book with a discussion of M.F.K.
Fisher's idiosyncratic defense of one of the great heroes of gluttony, Diamond Jim Brady, whose stomach was six times normal size."--Jacket.
Edition Statements
- Publication Date:2003.
Publication Statements
- Publisher(s):Oxford University Press
- Place of Publication:Oxford
- Language:eng
- Publication Date:2003.
Notes
Based on a lecture series in the humanities hosted by the New York Public Library.
The Physical Object
- Description:x, 108 pages : : illustrations (some color) ; : 19 cm
Edition Identifiers
- ISBN:0195156994, 9780195156997, 9780195312058, 0195312058
- oclc:ocn787810410
- LC Classification:BV4627.G5
- Dewey Decimal:178
Table of Contents
Ch. 1. Is Gluttony a Sin? -- Ch. 2. The Wages of Sin -- Ch. 3. The Real Wages of Sin -- Ch. 4. Great Moments in Gluttony.
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