ABSTRACT
Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature is the first scholarly volume on the topic, connecting children's literature to the burgeoning discipline of food studies. Following the lead of historians like Mark Kurlansky, Jeffrey Pilcher and Massimo Montanari, who use food as a fundamental node for understanding history, the essays in this volume present food as a multivalent signifier in children’s literature, and make a strong argument for its central place in literature and literary theory.
Written by some of the most respected scholars in the field, the essays between these covers tackle texts from the nineteenth century (Rudyard Kipling’s Kim) to the contemporary (Dave Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series), the U.S. multicultural (Asian-American) to the international (Ireland, Brazil, Mexico). Spanning genres such as picture books, chapter books, popular media, and children’s cookbooks, contributors utilize a variety of approaches, including archival research, cultural studies, formalism, gender studies, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, race studies, structuralism, and theology. Innovative and wide-ranging, Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature provides us with a critical opportunity to puzzle out the significance of food in children’s literature.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|18 pages
Introduction
part II|20 pages
Reading as Cooking
chapter Chapter Two|18 pages
Delicious Supplements: Literary Cookbooks as Additives to Children's Texts
part III|34 pages
Girls, Mothers, Children
chapter Chapter Three|16 pages
Recipe for Reciprocity and Repression: The Politics of Cooking and Consumption in Girls' Coming-of-Age Literature
chapter Chapter Four|16 pages
The Apple of Her Eye: The Mothering Ideology Fed by Best-selling Trade Picture Books
part IV|50 pages
Food and the Body
chapter Chapter Seven|18 pages
"Voracious Appetites": The Construction of "Fatness" in the Boy Hero in English Children's Literature
part V|68 pages
Global/Multicultural/Postcolonial Food
chapter Chapter Eight|12 pages
"The Eaters of Everything": Etiquettes of Empire in Kipling's Narratives of Imperial Boys
chapter Chapter Ten|18 pages
The Potato Eaters: Food Collection in Irish Famine Literature for Children
chapter Chapter Eleven|14 pages
The Keys to the Kitchen: Cooking and Latina Power in Latin(o) American Children's Stories
chapter Chapter Twelve|10 pages
Sugar or Spice? The Flavor of Gender Self-Identity in an Example of Brazilian Children's Literature
part VI|66 pages
Through Food the/a Self