1st Edition

Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing The Innovative Appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David

By Alice McLean Copyright 2012
208 Pages
by Routledge

220 Pages
by Routledge

208 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more
1. Nineteenth-Century Food Writing: From Gastronomic Literature to Domestic Cookbook  2. Forging a Space for Female Desire: M.F.K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me  3. A Queer Appetite: The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook  4. A Mediterranean Engagement: The Aesthetic Pleasures of Elizabeth David  5. Literary Heirs

Biography

Alice McLean is the author of Cooking in American History (1840-1945). She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis, before being awarded an Honors Teaching Fellowship at Sweet Briar College (2005-2009).

"Recommended." -- C. Holt-Fortin, SUNY Oswego, Choice

"McLean presses page-after-page the importance of dining, and so the literature about it...being so genuinely gastronomic makes the book a pleasure to read... McLean’s intelligent and fascinating account provides unmatched delectation for the meals-into-words tragics among us, people who might entitle a thesis something like, ‘Eating into thinking’, as I once did."Aristologist, "Women and gastronomy," Michael Symons

"Part cultural history of the sexual politics of food writing, part historical survey of female pleasure as articulated through physical appetite, and part examination of the way food can serve as metaphoric material for a feminine literary voice and sensibility, Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing makes a clear and persuasive case for the power of women’s gastronomic writing to make significant interventions into the social underpinnings of food culture in England and America." --Susan Derwin, University of California, Santa Barbara, Gastronomica