eBook

Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction

Sceats, Sarah

2000,2009

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: 20th century / Body image in literature / Body image in women / Body, Human, in literature / Consumption (Economics) in literature / Eating / Eating disorders in literature / English fiction / English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism / English fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism / Food habits in literature / Food in literature / Gastronomy in literature / Great Britain / History / History and criticism / Human body in literature / Women and literature / Women and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century / Women authors
• ISBN: 9780521661539, 9780521604550, 0521661536, 0521604559