Book Cover
Book
Author Prose, Francine, 1947-

Title Gluttony / Francine Prose
Published [New York] : New York Public Library ; Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2003

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 MELB  178 Pro/Gtd  AVAILABLE
Description x, 108 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 19 cm
Series The seven deadly sins
Seven deadly sins.
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
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."--BOOK JACKET
Analysis Gluttony
Notes Based on a lecture series in the humanities hosted by the New York Public Library
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [99]-100) and index
Subject Gluttony.
Author New York Public Library.
LC no. 2003042045
ISBN 0195156994 acid-free paper
0195312058 paperback
9780195312058 paperback