Introduction: The Literature of Food

Summary

This chapter introduces the reader to literary representations of food as well as the literary facets of culinary texts ranging from early modern receipt books and nineteenth-century cookbooks to contemporary culinary memoirs and food blogs. It highlights the complexities of food culture and foregrounds the role that food has played in the formation of racial identities, gendered bodies, national tastes, cultural memory, and social capital. Tracing the rich range of historical and theoretical approaches to literary food studies that have emerged over the past two decades, it offers an overview of how food and its literature came to be taken seriously by literary scholars. Finally, this section establishes the parameters of the Companion, and provides a chapter-by-chapter introduction to its contents.