The Harlequin Eaters: From Food Scraps to Modernism in Nineteenth-Century France - Softcover

Beizer, Janet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1517915902 ISBN 13: 9781517915902

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2024

Synopsis

How representations of the preparation, sale, and consumption of leftovers in nineteenth-century urban France link socioeconomic and aesthetic history
 

The concept of the “harlequin” refers to the practice of reassembling dinner scraps cleared from the plates of the wealthy to sell, replated, to the poor in nineteenth-century Paris. In The Harlequin Eaters, Janet Beizer investigates how the alimentary harlequin evolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the earlier, similarly patchworked Commedia dell’arte Harlequin character and can be used to rethink the entangled place of class, race, and food in the longer history of modernism. 

 

By superimposing figurations of the edible harlequin taken from a broad array of popular and canonical novels, newspaper articles, postcard photographs, and lithographs, Beizer shows that what is at stake in nineteenth-century discourses surrounding this mixed meal are representations not only of food but also of the marginalized people—the “harlequin eaters”—who consume it at this time when a global society is emerging. She reveals the imbrication of kitchen narratives and intellectual–aesthetic practices of thought and art, presenting a way to integrate socioeconomic history with the history of literature and the visual arts. The Harlequin Eaters also offers fascinating background to today’s problems of food inequity as it unpacks stories of the for-profit recycling of excess food across class and race divisions.

About this title

About the Author

Janet Beizer is C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France at Harvard University. She is author of Thinking through the Mothers: Reimagining Women’s Biographies; Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France; and Family Plots: Balzac’s Narrative Generations.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1517915902
• ISBN 13: 9781517915902
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352