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
ISBN: 1139426613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
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, 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
ISBN: 1139426613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

What's Eating You?

What's Eating You? PDF Author: Cynthia J. Miller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501322397
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Divided into four thematic sections, What's Eating You? explores the deeper significance of food on screen-the ways in which they reflect (or challenge) our deepest fears about consuming and being consumed. Among the questions it asks are: How do these films mock our taboos and unsettle our notions about the human condition? How do they critique our increasing focus on consumption? In what ways do they hold a mirror to our taken-for-granteds about food and humanity, asking if what we eat truly matters? Horror narratives routinely grasp those questions and spin them into nightmares. Monstrous “others” dine on forbidden fare; the tables of consumption are turned, and the consumer becomes the consumed. Overindulgence, as Le Grande Bouffe (1973) and Street Trash (1987) warn, can kill us, and occasionally, as films like The Stuff (1985) and Poultrygeist (2006) illustrate, our food fights back. From Blood Feast (1963) to Sweeney Todd (2007), motion pictures have reminded us that it is an “eat or be eaten” world.

Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century

Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Tamara S. Wagner
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739112076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century aims to bring together detailed analyses of the cultural myths, or fictions, of consumption that have shaped discourses on consumer practices from the eighteenth century onwards. Individual essays provide an excitingly diverse range of perspectives, including musicology, philosophy, history, and art history, cultural and postcolonial studies as well as the study of literature in English, French, and German. The broad scope of this collection will engage audience both inside and outside academia interested in the politics of food and consumption in eighteenth and nineteenth century culture.

Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium

Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium PDF Author: Jessica A. Folkart
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611485800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium: The Ends of Spanish Identity investigates the predominant perception of liminality—identity situated at a threshold, neither one thing nor another, but simultaneously both and neither—caused by encounters with otherness while negotiating identity in contemporary Spain. Examining how identity and alterity are parleyed through the cultural concerns of historical memory, gender roles, sex, religion, nationalism, and immigration, this study demonstrates how fictional representations of reality converge in a common structure wherein the end is not the end, but rather an edge, a liminal ground. On the border between two identities, the end materializes as an ephemeral limit that delineates and differentiates, yet also adjoins and approximates. In exploring the ends of Spanish fiction—both their structure and their intentionality—Liminal Fiction maps the edge as a constitutive component of narrative and identity in texts by Najat El Hachmi, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Javier Marías, Rosa Montero, and Manuel Rivas. In their representation of identity on the edge, these fictions enact and embody the liminal not as simply a transitional and transient mode but as the structuring principle of identification in contemporary Spain.

The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating

The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating PDF Author: Marion Gymnich
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3862347753
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death.In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine.It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture.

Making Sense

Making Sense PDF Author: Ralf Hertel
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004484477
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Fiction is fascinating. All it provides us with is black letters on white pages, yet while we read we do not have the impression that we are merely perceiving abstract characters. Instead, we see the protagonists before our inner eye and hear their voices. Descriptions of sumptuous meals make our mouths water, we feel physically repelled by depictions of violence or are aroused by the erotic details of sexual conquests. We submerge ourselves in the fictional world that no longer stays on the paper but comes to life in our imagination. Reading turns into an out-of-the-body experience or, rather, an in-another-body experience, for we perceive the portrayed world not only through the protagonist's eyes but also through his ears, nose, tongue, and skin. In other words, we move through the literary text as if through a virtual reality. How does literature achieve this trick? How does it turn mere letters into vividly experienced worlds? This study argues that techniques of sensuous writing contribute decisively to bringing the text to life in the reader's imagination. In detailed interpretations of British novels of the 1980s and 1990s by writers such as John Berger, John Banville, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, or J. M. Coetzee, it uncovers literary strategies for turning the sensuous experience into words and for conveying it to the reader, demonstrating how we make sense in, and of, literature. Both readers interested in the contemporary novel and in the sensuousness of the reading experience will profit from this innovative study that not only analyses the interest of contemporary authors in the senses but also pin-points literary entry points for the sensuous force of reading.

Voracious Children

Voracious Children PDF Author: Carolyn Daniel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135504474
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Voracious Children explores food and the way it is used to seduce, to pleasure, and coerce not only the characters within children's literature but also its readers. There are a number of gripping questions concerning the quantity and quality of the food featured in children's fiction that immediately arise: why are feasting fantasies so prevalent, especially in the British classics? What exactly is their appeal to historical and contemporary readers? What do literary food events do to readers? Is food the sex of children's literature? The subject of children eating is compelling but, why is it that stories about children being eaten are not only horrifying but also so incredibly alluring? This book reveals that food in fiction does far, far more that just create verisimilitude or merely address greedy readers' desires. The author argues that the food trope in children's literature actually teaches children how to be human through the imperative to eat good food in a proper controlled manner. Examining timely topics such as childhood obesity and anorexia, the author demonstrates how children's literature routinely attempts to regulate childhood eating practices and only award subjectivity and agency to those characters who demonstrate normal appetites. Examining a wide range of children's literature classics from Little Red Riding Hood to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , this book is an outstanding and unique enquiry into the function of food in children's literature, and it will make a significant contribution to the fields of both children's literature and the growing interdisciplinary domain of food, culture and society.

Excess and Embodiment in Contemporary Women's Writing

Excess and Embodiment in Contemporary Women's Writing PDF Author: Zeynep Atayurt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 389821978X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The 'obese' female body has often been portrayed as the 'other' to the slender body. However, this process of 'othering', or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where 'excess' has increasingly come to be studied as a 'physical abnormality' or a signifier of a 'personality defect' in contemporary Western society. This book engages with the multifarious re-imaginings of the 'excessive' embodiment in contemporary women's writing, drawing specifically on the construction of this form of embodiment in the works of Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Claude Tardat, and Judith Moore, whose texts offer a distinct literary response to the rigidly homogeneous and limiting representations of fatness, while prompting heterogeneous approaches to reading the 'excessive' female embodiment.

Eating Otherwise

Eating Otherwise PDF Author: Maria Christou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108267920
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
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.

Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing

Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing PDF Author: Alice McLean
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136706860
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book explores the aesthetic pleasures of eating and writing in the lives of M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992), Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967), and Elizabeth David (1913-1992). Growing up during a time when women's food writing was largely limited to the domestic cookbook, which helped to codify the guidelines of middle class domesticity, Fisher, Toklas, and David claimed the pleasures of gastronomy previously reserved for men. Articulating a language through which female desire is artfully and publicly sated, Fisher, Toklas, and David expanded women’s food writing beyond the domestic realm by pioneering forms of self-expression that celebrate female appetite for pleasure and for culinary adventure. In so doing, they illuminate the power of genre-bending food writing to transgress and reconfigure conventional gender ideologies. For these women, food encouraged a sensory engagement with their environment and a physical receptivity toward pleasure that engendered their creative aesthetic.