Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing

Description

Examines the rich and multiple meanings of food in women's writing. Focusing on women's writing of the last two centuries, Scenes of the Apple traces the intricate relationship between food and body image for women. Ranging over a variety of genres, including novels, culinary memoirs, and essays, the contributors explore works by a diverse group of writers, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Toni Morrison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Jeanette Winterson, as well as such nonliterary documents as discussions of Queen Victoria's appetite and news coverage of suffragettes' hunger strikes. Moreover, in addressing works by Hispanic, African, African American, Jewish, and lesbian writers, the book explodes the myth that only white, privileged, and heterosexual women are concerned with body image, and shows the many cultural contexts in which food and cooking are important in women's literature. Above all, the essays pay tribute to the rich and multiple meanings of food in women's writing as a symbol for all kinds of delightful—and transgressive—desires. Scenes of the Apple......Page 5 Contents......Page 7 Illustrations......Page 9 Acknowledgments......Page 11 1. Introduction: Scenes of the Apple: Appetite, Desire, Writing......Page 13 Part 1: Appetite and Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Politics......Page 55 2. Good and Plenty: Queen Victoria Figures the Imperial Body......Page 57 3. Ingestion, Contagion, Seduction: Victorian Metaphors of Reading......Page 77 4. Consuming Images: Women, Hunger, and the Vote......Page 99 Part 2: Grotesque, Ghostly, and Cannibalistic Hunger in Twentieth-Century Texts......Page 119 5. “The Courage of Her Appetites”: The Ambivalent Grotesque in Ellen Glasgow’s Romantic Comedians......Page 121 6. “Death Is a Skipped Meal Compared to This”: Food and Hunger in Toni Morrison’s Beloved......Page 141 7. “There Is No God Who Can Keep Us from Tasting”: Good Cannibalism in Hélène Cixous’s The Book of Promethea......Page 161 8. “I Cannot Eat My Words but I Do”: Food, Body, and Word in the Novels of Jeanette Winterson......Page 179 Part 3: Food and Cooking: Patriarchal, Colonial, Familial Structures......Page 193 9. Rewriting the Hysteric as Anorexic in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions......Page 195 10. Latin American Women Writers’ Novel Recipes and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate......Page 211 11. “A Sinkside, Stoveside, Personal Perspective”: Female Authority and Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women’s Writing......Page 227 Contributors......Page 251 A......Page 255 B......Page 256 C......Page 257 D......Page 258 E......Page 259 F......Page 260 H......Page 261 L......Page 262 M......Page 263 P......Page 264 R......Page 265 S......Page 266 T......Page 267 W......Page 268 Z......Page 269