Overview

In this stunning and important work, the prominent critic, poet, and memoirist Sandra M. Gilbert explores our relationship with food and eating through discussions of literature, art, and popular culture. Focusing on contemporary practices, The Culinary Imagination traces the social, aesthetic, and political history of food from myth to modernity, from ancient sources to our current wave of food mania. What does it mean to transform raw stuff into cooked dishes, which then become part of our own bodies; to savor festive meals yet resolve to renounce gluttony; to act as predators where in another life we might have become prey? Do the rituals of the kitchen have different meanings for men and women, for professional chefs and home cooks? Why, today, do so many of us turn so passionately toward table topics, on the page, online, and on screen? What are the philosophical implications of the food chain on which we all find ourselves? In The Culinary Imagination, Gilbert addresses these powerful questions through meditations on myths and memoirs, children's books, novels, poems, food blogs, paintings, TV shows, and movies. Discussing figures from Rex Stout to Julia Child and Andy Warhol, from M. F. K. Fisher and Sylvia Plath to Alice Waters and Peter Singer, she analyzes the politics and poetics of our daily bread, investigating our complex self-definitions as producers, consumers, and connoisseurs of food. The result is an ambitious, lively, and learned examination of the ways in which our culture's artists have represented food across a range of genres.

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9780393067651

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Reviews

It is hard to imagine how Sandra Gilbert could have produced so broad an overview of contemporary food writing and thought, not only literary analysis but also history, memoir ( foodoir! ), and bibliography. Anyone wanting an introduction to the meaning of food culture should start here. --Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studie

Feminist scholar and poet Sandra M. Gilberi dishes with gusto on our romance with food. --Lisa Shea

A rich, powerful, important delight of a book to mull over both for its splendid insights but also to use for years to come as a guidebook into the most important writing about food both now and in the past. --Louise DeSalvo

The Culinary Imagination is a meticulously researched and wonderfully written examination of how food is at the heart of our cultural identity. From Shakespeare to Pablo Neruda to Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol to Wayne Thiebaud, Gilbert skillfully follows the thread of gastronomy through history, art, literature, and pop culture with a scholar and poet s eye for detail and meaning. --Alice Waters

Author Information

Sandra M. Gilbert (1936—2024) was a distinguished literary critic and poet. Together with Susan Gubar, she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the NBCC.

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