The fury of men's gullets

Throughout his work, Ben Jonson referred to writing in terms of ingestion, digestion, and excretion, mimicking the functions of the digestive tract. In The Fury of Men's Gullets, Bruce Boehrer explores the poet's fascination with alimentary matters and the way in which such references describe Jonson's personal and cultural transformation.

Drawing on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the author studies the alimentary and convivial language in Jonson's work. He suggests that these pervasive metaphors provided the poet with a vocabulary for addressing issues of patronage and friendship, literary production and consumption, and social inclusion and exclusion.

In his wide-ranging examination of Jonson's plays, prose, and nondramatic verse, Boehrer discusses the sociohistorical significance of food, the politics of conspicuous consumption, the infrastructure of Jacobean London, and pertinent aspects of Renaissance medical practice and physiological theory. The Fury of Men's Gullets uniquely interprets Jonson's construction of early modern English literary sensibility.