Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction

Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction PDF

Author: Sarah Sceats

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-04-20

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1139426613

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This study explores the subtle and complex significance of food and eating in contemporary women's fiction. Sarah Sceats reveals how preoccupations with food, its consumption and the body are central to the work of writers such as Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis. Through close analysis of their fiction, Sceats examines the multiple metaphors associated with these themes, making powerful connections between food and love, motherhood, sexual desire, self identity and social behaviour. The activities surrounding food and its consumption (or non-consumption) embrace both the most intimate and the most thoroughly public aspects of our lives. The book draws on psychoanalytical, feminist and sociological theory to engage with a diverse range of issues, including chapters on cannibalism and eating disorders. This lively study demonstrates that feeding and eating are not simply fundamental to life but are inseparable from questions of gender, power and control.

Food and Femininity in Twentieth-Century British Women's Fiction

Food and Femininity in Twentieth-Century British Women's Fiction PDF

Author: Andrea Adolph

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1317134591

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In her feminist intervention into the ways in which British women novelists explore and challenge the limitations of the mind-body binary historically linked to constructions of femininity, Andrea Adolph examines female characters in novels by Barbara Pym, Angela Carter, Helen Dunmore, Helen Fielding, and Rachel Cusk. Adolph focuses on how women's relationships to food (cooking, eating, serving) are used to locate women's embodiment within the everyday and also reveal the writers' commitment to portraying a unified female subject. For example, using food and food consumption as a lens highlights how women writers have used food as a trope that illustrates the interconnectedness of sex and gender with issues of sexuality, social class, and subjectivity-all aspects that fall along a continuum of experience in which the intellect and the physical body are mutually complicit. Historically grounded in representations of women in periodicals, housekeeping and cooking manuals, and health and beauty books, Adolph's theoretically informed study complicates our understanding of how women's social and cultural roles are intricately connected to issues of food and food consumption.

Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies

Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies PDF

Author: Nieves Pascual Soler

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-12-12

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 3319709232

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This book is concerned with food autobiographies written by men from the 1980s to the present. It concentrates on how food has transformed autobiographical narratives and how these define the ways men eat and cook nowadays. After presenting a historical overview of the place of food within men ́s autobiography, this volume analyzes the reasons for our present interest in food and the proliferation of life narratives focused on cooking. Then it centers around the identities that male chefs are taking on in the writing of their lives and the generic models they use: the heroic, the criminal and the hunting autobiographical scripts. This study gives evidence that autobiographies are crucial in the redefinition of the new masculinities emerging in the kitchen. It will appeal to readers interested in Food Studies, Autobiographical Studies, Men's Studies and American Literature and Culture.

Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction

Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction PDF

Author: Lorna Piatti-Farnell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-07-13

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1136645535

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Establishing an interdisciplinary connection between Food Studies and American literary scholarship, Piatti-Farnell investigates the significances of food and eating in American fiction, from 1980 to the present day. She argues that culturally-coded representations of the culinary illuminate contemporary American anxieties about class gender, race, tradition, immigration, nationhood, and history. As she offers a critical analysis of major works of contemporary fiction, Piatti-Farnell unveils contrasting modes of culinary nostalgia, disillusionment, and progress that pervasively address the cultural disintegration of local and familiar culinary values, in favor of globalized economies of consumption. In identifying different incarnations of the "American culinary," Piatti-Farnell covers the depiction of food in specific categories of American fiction and explores how the cultural separation that molds food preferences inevitably challenges the existence of a homogenous American identity. The study treads on new grounds since it not only provides the first comprehensive study of food and consumption in contemporary American fiction, but also aims to expose interrelated politics of consumption in a variety of authors from different ethnic, cultural, racial and social backgrounds within the United States.

Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction

Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction PDF

Author: Katarina Labudova

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-11-10

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 3031191684

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This book looks at Margaret Atwood’s use of food motifs in speculative fiction. Focusing on six novels – The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, the Maddaddam trilogy, and The Heart Goes Last – Katarina Labudova explores the environmental, ecological, and cultural questions at play and the possible future scenarios which emerge for humanity’s survival in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic conditions. Labudova argues that food has special relevance in these novels and that characters’ hunger, limited food choices, culinary creativity and eating rituals are central to Atwood’s depictions of hostile environments. She also links food to hierarchy, dominance and oppression in Atwood’s novels, and foregrounds the problem of hunger, both psychological or physical, caused by pollution and loss of contact with the natural and authentic. The book shows how Atwood’s writing draws from a range of genres, including apocalyptic fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, utopia, fairy tale, myth, and thriller – and how food is an important, highly versatile motif linking these intertextual threads.

Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women’s Writing

Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women’s Writing PDF

Author: Lucille Cairns

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2023-05-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1802076484

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Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women’s Writing examines the most common types of Eating Disorders (EDs) - anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa/bulimarexia, and binge eating disorder - as represented in contemporary French women’s literature. The primary corpus comprises 40 autobiographical (and very occasionally autofictional) texts complemented by ample reference, and sometimes challenge, to clinical, medically-researched based, or theoretical publications on EDs.

What is Eating Latin American Women Writers

What is Eating Latin American Women Writers PDF

Author: Renée Sum Scott

Publisher: Cambria Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1604976403

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Latin American publications on weight and eating disorders abound, especially in the fields of psychology and sociology. However, there are only a few articles addressing these themes in the fictional work of Latin American women authors. What Is Eating Latin American Women Writers fills a theoretical void because it speaks to an ever-growing interest in Latin American literature about women, food, and the body. This study not only traces for the first time the historical development of the topics of food, eating consumption, and body image but also features well-known authors and others who are yet to be discovered in United States. The book contributes to the ongoing critical dialogue about women and food by offering an analysis of food, weight, and eating disorders in Latin American and Latina literary production.

Eating Otherwise

Eating Otherwise PDF

Author: Maria Christou

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-09-28

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1108267920

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This book explores the philosophical implications of the popular adage that 'you are what you eat' through twentieth-century literature. It investigates the connections between the alimentary and the ontological: between what or how one eats and what one is. Maria Christou's focus is on two influential modernist figures, Georges Bataille and Samuel Beckett; and two influential postmodernist figures, Paul Auster and Margaret Atwood. She aims to theorize the relationship between modernism and postmodernism from a specifically alimentary perspective. By examining the work of these major twentieth-century authors, this book focuses on strange or unusual acts of eating - 'eating' otherwise - as a means to ways of 'being' otherwise. What can eating tell us about being, about who we are and about our being in the world? This powerful, innovative study takes literary food studies in a new direction.

What's Eating You?

What's Eating You? PDF

Author: Cynthia J. Miller

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-02-23

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1501322389

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Explores the horrific side of consumption, as it is portrayed in film and television—from what (and whom) we eat to food that “bites back.”