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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

‘Gilded Gravel In The Bowl’: Ireland’S Cuisine And Culinary Heritage In The Poetry Of Seamus Heaney, Anke Klitzing Aug 2021

‘Gilded Gravel In The Bowl’: Ireland’S Cuisine And Culinary Heritage In The Poetry Of Seamus Heaney, Anke Klitzing

Articles

Seamus Heaney’s poetry is rich in detail about agricultural and food practices in his native Northern Ireland from the 1950s onwards, such as cattle-trading, butter-churning, eel-fishing, blackberry-picking or home-baking. Often studied from an ecocritical perspective, the abundance of agricultural and culinary scenes in Heaney’s work makes a gastrocritical focus on food and foodways suitable. Food has been recognized as a highly condensed social fact, and writers have long tapped into its multi-layered meanings to illuminate socio-cultural circumstances, making literature a valuable ethnographic source. A gastrocritical reading of Heaney’s work from 1966 to 2010, drawing on Rozin’s Structure of Cuisine, shows …


Food And The Irish Short Story Imagination, Anke Klitzing Jul 2021

Food And The Irish Short Story Imagination, Anke Klitzing

Articles

Short fiction is a format heartily embraced by the Irish literary imagination since the nineteenth century. This paper takes a gastrocritical approach to investigate the role of food in selected stories from the recently published anthology The Art of the Glimpse (2020). It shows that through the years, food and foodways have been valuable tools for Irish writers, providing setting and context, themes and symbols, plot points, conflicts, characterisation, as well as the quintessential epiphanies.


Commensality And Connection: How Shared Food Experiences Connect Characters In Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials, The Book Of Dust And ‘Lyra’ Stories, Susan Anna Grace May 2020

Commensality And Connection: How Shared Food Experiences Connect Characters In Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials, The Book Of Dust And ‘Lyra’ Stories, Susan Anna Grace

Articles

Commensality is an inherently social activity that shapes society and enacts social dynamics. Consequently, these shared exchanges can reveal much about the society and the individuals who engage in the act. This thesis explores commensality in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, The Book of Dust Series and companion texts to the novels. The research investigates how commensal exchanges create and maintain connections between characters across the collection. In doing so, it considers how literary characters differ from real-life humans and how the existing body of knowledge on commensality can be applied to literary figures. A qualitative approach was …


My Palate Hung With Starlight: A Gastrocritical Reading Of Seamus Heaney’S Poetry, Anke Klitzing Dec 2019

My Palate Hung With Starlight: A Gastrocritical Reading Of Seamus Heaney’S Poetry, Anke Klitzing

Articles

Nobel-prize winning poet Seamus Heaney is celebrated for his rich verses recalling his home in the Northern Irish countryside of County Derry. Yet while the imaginative links to nature in his poetry have already been critically explored, little attention has been paid so far to his rendering of local food and foodways. From ploughing, digging potatoes and butter-churning to picking blackberries, Heaney sketches not only the everyday activities of mid-20th century rural Ireland, but also the social dynamics of community and identity and the socio-cultural symbiosis embedded in those practices. Larger questions of love, life and death also infiltrate the …


‘Some Foods Are Considered Aphrodisiac Because They Resemble Sexual Organs’: On Isabel Allende’S Aphrodite, Anke Klitzing Feb 2019

‘Some Foods Are Considered Aphrodisiac Because They Resemble Sexual Organs’: On Isabel Allende’S Aphrodite, Anke Klitzing

Articles

At the age of 56, well into her second marriage and a grandmother herself, novelist Isabel Allende decided to find out whether aphrodisiacs are all they are made out to be. She wrote Aphrodite: The Love of Food and Food of Love after extensive research into erotic literature across some centuries and continents, and this foundation of age-old wisdom also means that the book, while published in 1998, remains a timeless source of inspiration and enjoyment.


The Contribution Of P. G. Wodehouse To The Field Of Gastronomy Through His Character, The French Chef, Anatole, Elizabeth Wilson Jan 2019

The Contribution Of P. G. Wodehouse To The Field Of Gastronomy Through His Character, The French Chef, Anatole, Elizabeth Wilson

Dissertations

In her paper ‘A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in 19th-Century France’, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson argues that the field of gastronomy came into existence in the middle of the nineteenth century in France. This field of gastronomy was constructed from two elements, the significance that gastronomy, defined at the time as a structured set of culinary practices, had attained in France by the nineteenth century, but also, the contribution of writers of culinary discourse who wrote about this gastronomy. These writers came from different disciplines and included the realist fiction writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), whose work Ferguson describes …


Pineapple Poetry - Studying Literature Through A Food Studies Lens, Anke Klitzing Dec 2018

Pineapple Poetry - Studying Literature Through A Food Studies Lens, Anke Klitzing

Articles

In his essay 'A Winter Feast', literature professor Paul Schmidt unveils the layers of meaning that Pushkin wove into the description of a New Year’s feast in Eugene Onegin. But unusually, Schmidt continues his essay making the jump from literary criticism to food studies by musing on the various items on the menu without reference to Onegin, but rather to the cultural and philosophical context of food, bringing in such varied references as Brillat-Savarin and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Studying food writing through the lens of literary criticism allows us to penetrate the social and symbolic meanings of food more deeply, while …