April Fuller
By Regina Yoong
Ohio University alumna April Fuller recently co-authored a post with Laurel Bassett on “Got Gout? Eighteenth-Century Global “Remedies” in Mary Kettilby’s Receipt Book” for The Folger Shakespeare Library.
“The post came out of a brief collaborative paper that a classmate and I wrote in a seminar class. We then presented companion papers at MACBS this year on gout and recipe books in the 18th century,” Fuller explains.
She earned an M.A. in English from the College of Arts & Sciences at OHIO in 2017.
Global ‘Remedies’
Fuller raises important questions on Kettilby’s receipt book to examine relationship between language and the “social and political weight” involved in culinary wonders during the 18th century.
“The rhetoric and language of these texts require the readers to believe in the wondrous qualities of the recipes and that their ‘English’ cures are the key to society’s health issues. Wonder was, and perhaps still is, bound to foodstuffs, especially exotic rarities, and many authors of the period blurred the boundaries between English and foreign goods,” she says.
“Does their homeland cure them of voyages of the palate, or do the exotic foods that created their illnesses heal them? Medicinal texts bring domestic and foreign ingredients into strange intimacy with each other, reinforcing the dichotomy between wonder and horror in the marketplace,” she added.
Currently, Fuller is a doctoral student in English literature at the University of Maryland, studying food and disgust in the 18th century. She currently serves as Chair of ASECS’s Graduate Student Caucus and is an editorial assistant for The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. She is currently working on her dissertation. Her tentative title is “(re) Imagining Food and Disgust in Eighteenth-Century Britain.”
Comments