Over the past decade, cultural histories of US food and restaurant culture such as Cindy R. Lobel's Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (2014), Andrew P. Haley's Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class (2012), Harvey Levenstein's Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (2003), and Pysche Williams-Forson's Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food and Power (2006), and literary studies such as Marie Drews and Monica Elbert's Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2009), Kyla Wazana Tompkins's Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (2012), and Allison Carruth's Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (2013), have done much to reshape the alimentary landscape of nineteenth-century American literary study. Kathryn Cornell Dolan's Beyond the Fruited Plain contributes to this conversation by turning our attention from what, where, or why nineteenth-century Americans ate to the shifting spaces and cultural as well as technological machinery that at once produced and transformed their food.

Beyond the Fruited Plain centers on the period following the Mexican–American War through the Spanish–American War – on, in other words, a key moment of US territorial expansion and an underexplored era of what Dolan aptly terms “agri-expansion” (3). It persuasively links the reformist impulses and literary critiques of this agricultural revolution in the nineteenth century to our contemporary concerns about agribusiness and industrial food apocalypse, and, most crucially, uncovers how nineteenth-century America's technological and economic expansion was intertwined with – indeed, solidified by – the project of vastly industrializing and expanding US agricultural production. For as Dolan reminds us, “the national importance of the wheat trade [in the years following the Civil War] was so great that U.S. production and distribution of wheat was second only to Britain's, and it significantly influenced the U.S. economy well into the twentieth century” (180).

Dolan focusses her study on five key literary figures who indexed, critiqued, and at times celebrated US “agri-expansion”: Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Frank Norris. Chapter 1, “Expanding Agriculture,” convincingly argues that Melville's land-focussed writings challenge globalization as much as his sea-based ones do, and that in texts like Pierre he critiques feudal agriculture, modern reforms, and the effects of agribusiness in both the South Pacific and the Berkshires. Her second chapter, “Local Beans, Apples, Berries,” chronicles what might be described as locavorism avant la lettre by way of Henry David Thoreau's dietary and local eating experiments in Walden (1854), arguing that Thoreau “realizes that the trend of excessive use of lands by the United States as part of an expanding agricultural, territorial, and political goal has a correlation in the national diet” (93). In chapter 3, “Fruits of Regionalism,” Dolan turns to Stowe's postbellum championing of the orange as a form of culinary regionalism aimed at reuniting a fractured nation and boosting tourism while simultaneously supporting local rather than global forms of agricultural trade. Her fourth chapter, “Sweet Fruits of Empire,” intriguingly charts Twain's increasing (if not exactly linear) anti-imperialist sentiments through his uneasy evocations of sugar in his Autobiography (2010) and Tom Sawyer (1876), his initially laudatory views of the global expansion of US sugar plantations to Hawaii, and his eventual concerns over coolie labor exploitation and the parallels between US expansion and the British Empire in Following the Equator (1897). And her fifth chapter, “The Wheat Strikes Back,” unsettles traditional readings of Frank Norris as simply a proponent of the agri-expansion he chronicles in The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903) by detailing the way these novels turn their attention to “the potential consequences of capitalist forces becoming exploitative of the natural world and those people who work the land” (178) and thus enact what Dolan compellingly identifies as “an early form of second-wave eco-criticism” (178).

Ultimately, Beyond the Fruited Plain asks us to rethink the role of agriculture in nineteenth-century American literature and culture and to question how writers we might not initially have thought of as eco-critical might speak to the “agri-expansion” of our own day. This study would have been enriched by situating this discussion within the broader recent conversation begun by Tompkins on dietary reform as a nineteenth-century technology of racial formation and, more recently, by Carruth on the global power dynamics of US food culture, as well as by drawing on the ongoing critical conversation on postbellum regional reconciliation begun by the work of Nina Silber in The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (1993) and more recently continued by Jennifer Greeson in Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (2010) in its analysis of Stowe's work “to use diet and agriculture, the production and consumption of regional U.S. foods, to make the South and the North ‘friends’ once again” (138). Its readings would also have benefited from greater attention to the wider cultural rhetoric of food and agricultural expansion against which its chosen authors wrestled. This is, nevertheless, a fascinating and much-needed book, and one that will surely broker important further avenues of study in the fields of both food studies and the environmental humanities.