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Read My Plate

The Literature of Food

Read My Plate cover

Description

Whether perusing a recipe or learning what a literary character eats, readers approach a text differently when reading about food. Read My Plate: The Literature of Food explores what narrators and characters (in fiction, in performance, and in the popular genre of the “food memoir”) cook and eat. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the inmates of the Terezin concentration camp, performance artist Karen Finley, novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and the celebrated chef-turned-travel-journalist Anthony Bourdain are just a few examples of the writers whose works are discussed. Close readings of the literal and figurative “plates” in these texts allow a unique form of intimate access to the speakers’ feelings and memories and help readers to understand more about how the dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and social class affect what the narrators/characters eat, from tourtière to collard greens to a school lunch bento box.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One. The Hungry Yawp: Eating and Orality in Whitman and Ginsberg

Chapter Two. The Politics of Gluttony in Second-Generation Holocaust Literature

Chapter Three. Chukla Bukla: Cooking, Bengali-Indian-Anglo-American Writers, and the Merging of Cultures

Chapter Four. Feeding the Audience: Food, Feminism, and Performance Art

Chapter Five. The Last Black Man’s Fried Chicken: Soul Food, Memory, and African American Culinary Writing

Chapter Six. Cooking Up a Storm: Recent Food Memoirs and the Angry Daughter

Chapter Seven. Eat and Run: Food Writing, Masculinity, and the “Male Midlife Crisis”

Chapter Eight. School Lunch: Bicultural Conflicts in Asian-American Women’s Food Memoirs

Conclusion



Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Product details

Published 29 May 2019
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Extent 180
ISBN 9781498574440
Imprint Lexington Books
Illustrations 1 b/w photos;
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Deborah R. Geis

Deborah R. Geis is professor of English at DePauw…

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