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Nourishing The Self: Cookbooks As Autobiography, Rebecca Quist Barlow

Theses and Dissertations

Though casual readers may often assume cookbooks are primarily reference materials,cookbooks actually offer readers a type of autobiography; I examine cookbooks as literary autobiographical acts by analyzing three celebrity chefs' cookbooks and the recent film, Julie and Julia. Julie and Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, illustrates several key autobiographical ideas, specifically Barthes' ideas of readerly and writerly texts and the distinction between an author and a persona. The film acts as a visual representation of the way a reader engages with a text and makes it a writerly text while successfully distinguishing between an author and …