UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation explores the historical entanglement between literature and food. Specifically, it examines how gastronomy embodies and extends sentiments and sensibilities of poetry from the ninth to the seventeenth century. I adopt the concepts of “taste” and “gastropoetics” as its primary theoretical framework, centering on food poetry and literati cookbooks as key materials, and cut across the disciplines of literary history, aesthetics, food culture, sensory culture, and material culture to offer a more nuanced understanding of the cultural landscape of their time. In literary studies, this dissertation examines how less studied texts like cookbooks contributed to Chinese literary culture. In food studies, it calls attention to the importance of the historical roots of China’s rich gastronomic culture today and how they enriched the world history of food culture. And in sensory studies, it brings historical examples of how writing about food could be multisensory and how the literati’s taste shaped their aesthetic, social, moral, and political discourses. As for material culture, it addresses the blurry boundary between food and non-food items that uncovers the inner coherence behind seemingly independent literati creations.Chapter one, “Contextualizing Gastronomic Literature in the Song Dynasty,” reconstructs the social and cultural milieu when the literati culture and culinary culture both prospered in the Song dynasty. Chapter two, “Qing Aesthetics, the Poetic Spleen, and Plum Blossom Consumption” traces the transformation of the aesthetic concept of qing (purity) and its manifestation in gastronomy. Chapter three, “A Lyrical Cookbook: Pure Offerings in the Mountains,” focuses on a particular literati cookbook to emphasize the autobiographical nature and affective functions of what I call “lyrical cookbooks.” Chapter four, “The Afterlife of ‘Pure Offerings’: the ‘Pure’ Tastemakers of the Late Ming,” interrogates the concept of literati “tastemakers” and traces its pattern of recurrence, and explores how the concept of qing was reintegrated into literati arts. Each chapter reinforces the central argument that poetics is not confined to poetry as a narrow literary form. Instead, its ideas, emotions, and beauty permeate other literary and artistic genres, even extending into everyday life.