Jam Puffs and White Bread: Habits of Eating and Othering in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Joseph Conrad's 'Amy Foster'.

George Eliot and Joseph Conrad do not often find themselves discussed on the same page. The first is a writer of rural realism and the other a Polish born aristocrat turned sailor turned author of transnational and political fiction who early in his career declared himself 'modern'. However, the similarities between these two writers are not only found in their personal circumstances - alienation, change of name, physical and mental illness - but in their call upon humanity to find meaning in a universe that apparently has none. This paper explores the scientific materialist position of Conrad and Eliot, arguing that each uses food as a deterministic tool in the lives of their characters, securing not only their natures but the traditions and values that determine their fates.