Abstract

This article aims to investigate literary representations of food function as narrative strategies
across four diverse literary texts spanning from Renaissance to contemporary literature— Herman
Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Christopher Marlowe’s The
Tragedy of Doctor Faustus, and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Though distinct in genre and era, what
unites these works is the way they illustrate how the consumption or refraining of food operate as
narrative devices through which structures of authority, social hierarchy, and resistance are
articulated across different historical and cultural contexts. Whether it is Bartleby’s refusal to food
and Yeong-hye’s vegetal transformation, or the overindulgence of the pigs, the extravagant
banquets of the Pope and the gluttony of Faustus, the paper argues how these very different works
reveal one persistent literary motif which is the politics of food. Adopting a comparative
framework grounded in close textual analysis, the study examines how food moves beyond
sustenance and becomes a contested terrain through which relations of power are enacted,
resisted, and exposed.
Keywords: Food, resistance, power, capitalism, Marxism, vegetarianism