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Read My Plate

The Literature of Food
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Whether perusing a recipe or learning what a literary character eats, readers approach a text differently when reading about food. Read My Plate: The Literature of Food explores what narrators and characters (in fiction, in performance, and in the popular genre of the "food memoir") cook and eat. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the inmates of the Terezin concentration camp, performance artist Karen Finley, novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and the celebrated chef-turned-travel-journalist Anthony Bourdain are just a few examples of the writers whose works are discussed. Close readings of the literal and figurative "plates" in these texts allow a unique form of intimate access to the speakers feelings and memories and helps readers to understand more about how the dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and social class affect what the narrators/characters eat, from tourtiere to collard greens to a school lunch bento box.

Deborah R. Geis is professor of English at DePauw University.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One. The Hungry Yawp: Eating and Orality in Whitman and Ginsberg

Chapter Two. The Politics of Gluttony in Second-Generation Holocaust Literature

Chapter Three. Chukla Bukla: Cooking, Bengali-Indian-Anglo-American Writers, and the Merging of Cultures

Chapter Four. Feeding the Audience: Food, Feminism, and Performance Art

Chapter Five. The Last Black Man’s Fried Chicken: Soul Food, Memory, and African American Culinary Writing

Chapter Six. Cooking Up a Storm: Recent Food Memoirs and the Angry Daughter

Chapter Seven. Eat and Run: Food Writing, Masculinity, and the “Male Midlife Crisis”

Chapter Eight. School Lunch: Bicultural Conflicts in Asian-American Women’s Food Memoirs

Conclusion
 

Deborah R. Geis expands our understanding of the literature of food, both in terms of genre and of methods to approach a portion of food writing. Her delicate explication of food memoir and performance art through lenses of gender, race, and migration melds with treatment of more traditional texts of fiction and poetry to yield a deeply empathetic contemplation about foods personal and political resonance.--Miriam Mara, Arizona State University

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