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Bhadury, Poushali . The Lion and the Unicorn ; Baltimore Vol. 35, Iss. 2, (Apr 2011): 189-194.
ABSTRACT
[...] food in Nancy Drew stories marks class status and moral superiority, signaling "the protagonists' privileged
status and ability to consume at will" (77), while separating Nancy and her friends from the criminal elements they
encounter; second, cooking and eating "provide repetitive ritual, domestic comfort" (77) by letting the characters
(and readers) recharge after high-action sleuthing sequences, and allow for specifically feminine interaction
between the protagonists; and third, food charts the three main characters' consumption and body image. The
essays consider diverse genres of children's texts-"picture books, chapter books, popular media, and children's
cookbooks" (14) for instance-as well as utilizing "archival research, culture studies, feminism, formalism, gender
studies, material culture, metaphysics, popular culture, postcolonialism, post-structuralism, race, structuralism and
theology" (14).
FULL TEXT
Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard, eds. Critical Approaches to Food in Children's Literature. New York: Routledge,
2009.
Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard's introduction to this essay collection-a pioneering critical anthology exploring the
intersection of food studies and children's literature-resembles a manifesto. The editors argue for the central ity of
representations of food in human experience and cultures in general, and literary discourse in particular. They
begin by analyzing a passage from The Odyssey to explain how the "presence of food, food production, and scenes
of eating and feasting" (4) become integral to the epic, before moving on to other pivotal food-related moments in
Gilgamesh, The Metamorphoses, The Canterbury Tales, and The Remembrance of Things Past. Their examples
underscore this volume's premise that food studies, and literary studies of food in particular, have long been
marginalized within academic discourse.
Food studies, Keeling and Pollard write, began primarily in anthropology, sociology, and history, and then moved
into the humanities, most significantly with the 2001 founding of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture,
an interdisciplinary journal of food studies that also addresses literature. Mentioning prominent theorists-Roland
Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Louis Marin, Julia Kristeva-who place "food at the center of their cultural analyses" (8),
the editors declare that the "field is now at the point that we need studies exclusively devoted to food and
literature" (8). They narrow this focus by interrogating the complex ways in which food manifests within children's
literature, and admit that the intersection of children's literature and food studies scholarship yields many more
articles than book-length analyses. Their volume of essays, arising from their Children's Literature Association
special session on food at the 2004 Modern Language Association conference, thus comes as a welcome addition
to existing scholarship.
Critical Approaches to Food in Children's Literature offers sixteen essays drawing from a range of children's texts
as well as diverse theoretical approaches; the editors liken the book's five thematic sections to a multi-course
banquet (especially since they get increasingly longer). The introduction starts the feast, followed by "Reading as
Cooking," which includes Jodie Slothower and Jan Susina's "Delicious Supplements: Literary Cookbooks as
DETAILS
Subject: Childrens literature; Novels; Anthologies; Childrens picture books; Children &youth;
Linguistics; Food; Essays
Volume: 35
Issue: 2
Pages: 189-194
Number of pages: 6
ISSN: 01472593