Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing

Description

In this study, McLean explores the aesthetic pleasures of eating and writing in the lives of three of the most eloquent food writers of the twentieth-century: 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 delineated a track hedged by duty, domesticity, and self-sacrifice, Fisher, Toklas, and David each pioneered an idiosyncratic form of writing that challenged such rigidly gendered and proscriptive bounds. They did so by writing about food as a source of sensual pleasure, both aesthetic and erotic. For these women, food encouraged a sensory engagement with their environment and a physical receptivity toward pleasure that engendered their creative aesthetic. Articulating a language through which female appetite is not only celebrated but also artfully and publicly sated, Fisher, Toklas, and David expanded women’s food writing beyond the domestic realm to establish a tradition of British and American culinary literature that celebrates 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.

Contents

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

Author Bio

Alice McLean is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Sweet Briar College.

Related Subjects

1. Women's Literature
2. Literature & Gender Studies
3. Gender