The Writer's Feast: Food and the Cultures of Representation by Supriya Chaudhuri and Rimi B. Chatterjee (Eds.) (2011-02-01) - Hardcover

Supriya Chaudhuri And Rimi B. Chatterjee (Eds.)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8125041958 ISBN 13: 9788125041955

Publisher: Orient Blackswan, 2011

Synopsis

Sharing food, eating salt, breaking bread, raising a toast, picnics in the wild, formal dinners, all have certain ideological, political and social significances some foods are taboo, whereas others endow the eater with purity the means of preparing or processing food in different cultures each symbolise something the writer’s feast is a collection of essays that discuss the various symbolic representations associated with food the essays in this volume show how food is a system of signs through which human societies give meanings to the material world they inhabit the book is divided into four thematic sections the first section eating cultures looks at social practices and systems relating to food and its consumption the second section gendering food, focuses on the gender implications of cooking and serving food in the third section, migrancy, diaspora and the cosmopolitan gourmet, the overwhelming importance of the symbolic function of food is discussed in immigrant narratives, a

About this title

About the Author:

Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor and Co-ordinator of the Centre of Advanced Study in the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Rimi B. Chatterjee teaches English at Jadavpur University, India. Her academic book Empires of the Mind (OUP India, 2006), won the SHARP de Long Book Prize for that year.

Review:

The joy of cooking has always included the joy of reading about food. Now The Writer s Feast offers us a banquet of essays, a menu of migrations: the geographical and cultural movements of ingredients, cuisines, habits and representations of the foods we eat and the ways we eat them, think about them, and use them to enrich our bodies, our imaginations, and our lives. --Professor Ruth Morse, University of Paris VII, Denis Diderot

... a delicious ensemble of various treatments of food, and cultural and natural phenomena around it ... this volume fills a large gap in our critical engagement with literary texts. The Writer s Feast is a feast not only for the academic analyst, but will please the palate of all who have a taste for an informed engagement with cultural phenomena. ... an excellent volume of critical engagements. --Professor Aniket Jaaware, University of Pune

'This is a timely and important collection of essays that makes a significant contribution to the emerging field of food and culture. As a whole, the volume creatively rethinks the social, symbolic and political meanings of food across a broad sweep of aesthetic and cultural contexts.' --Professor Modhumita Roy, Tufts University, Boston

About this edition

• Publisher: Orient Blackswan
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 8125041958
• ISBN 13: 9788125041955
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256