Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction
Cambridge University Press, 4/20/2000
EAN 9780521661539, ISBN10: 0521661536
Hardcover, 224 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
This study explores the subtle and complex significance of food and eating in contemporary women's fiction. Sarah Sceats reveals how preoccupations with food, its consumption and the body are central to the work of writers such as Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis. Through close analysis of their fiction, Sceats examines the multiple metaphors associated with these themes, making powerful connections between food and love, motherhood, sexual desire, self identity and social behaviour. The activities surrounding food and its consumption (or non-consumption) embrace both the most intimate and the most thoroughly public aspects of our lives. The book draws on psychoanalytical, feminist and sociological theory to engage with a diverse range of issues, including chapters on cannibalism and eating disorders. This lively study demonstrates that feeding and eating are not simply fundamental to life but are inseparable from questions of gender, power and control.
Introduction
1. The food of love
mothering, feeding, eating and desire
2. Cannibalism and Carter
fantasies of omnipotence
3. Eating, starving and the body
Doris Lessing and others
4. Sharp appetites
Margaret Atwood's consuming politics
5. Food and manners
Roberts and Ellis
6. Social eating
identity, communion and difference
Conclusion.