1st Edition

Food Places in Children's Literature

By Sabine Planka Copyright 2025
208 Pages
by Routledge

208 Pages
by Routledge

Food Places in Children’s Literature analyses how food, place and social interactions are intertwined in children’s and young adult novels. This book sets out to analyse a range of children’s books from across the 20th and 21st centuries, each of which relate to specific kinds of places, from the kitchen to the restaurant to the ad hoc picnic place, by using selected spatial theories, but also... Read more

Mottos

Introduction   

Chapter 1        (Mis-)Communication and (Mis-)Behaviour in Private and Public Places: Kitchens and Restaurants as Places of Conflict and Care

Chapter 2        When Food becomes Torture: Eating Disorders in Private Kitchens and (Semi-)Public Dining-Rooms

Chapter 3        Eating and Food Supply under Extreme Conditions: Food (Supply) and Surveillance in Prison-Like Places

Chapter 4        Where Outsiders and Cool Kids Meet: The School Cafeteria as a Food Place between Conflicts and Solidarity

Chapter 5        Places of the Ephemeral and the Enduring: Candy Factories, Sweetshops and the Production, Creation and Incorporation of Culture, Identity, and Memory

Chapter 6        Metropolises, Villages, No-man’s-lands: Food Places and Food Experiences in Urban and Rural Settings


Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Biography

Sabine Planka, Dr. phil., works as an academic librarian at the Martin-Opitz-Library (Herne, Germany) in the field of public relations and event/project management, and as a visiting lecturer at Bielefeld University (Bielefeld, Germany) in the field of children’s literature. Her research particularly focuses on children’s literature, cookbook literature and literary food studies. She is also interested in aspects of space and gender theory as well as film studies. Latest publications include, for example, Cultural Perspectives on Sweets in Children’s Literature and Media (2025, edited by Sabine Planka and Corina Löwe); “What and How Will We Eat in Future? Food Culture, Food System, and Food Memory in Cli-fi Novels for Young Adults” (2024, together with Corina Löwe), and “Meet to Eat. The Restaurant as Narrative Setting in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and The Fisher King (1991)” in A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam (2023) edited Sabine Planka, Philip van der Merwe, and Ian Bekker.