Writing the Meal : : Dinner in the Fiction of Twentieth-Century Women Writers / / Diane Elizabeth McGee.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UTP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: McGee, Diane Elizabeth,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2001
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

In most cultures, women are in charge of meals and the rituals and customs surrounding meals. Writing the Meal explores the importance of dinners and other meals in fiction by Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, and other women writing at the turn of the twentieth century. The author proposes that the depiction of meals has particular significance and resonance for women writers, and that these presentations of meals reflect larger concerns about women's domestic and public roles in a time of social and cultural change.Dinners serve as both a metaphor for the work of art and a source of inspiration for the fictional artist, while some works of fiction can be read as meals offered to the reader. As part of a larger domestic experience, dinners propose a new artistic language, which can be a crucial component of twentieth-century women's art.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: 'A Time to Eat' -- 1. Hors d'Oeuvres: Food, Culture, and Language -- 2. The Angel in the Kitchen: Early Twentieth-Century Trends in Dining -- 3. In with the In-Crowd: Edith Wharton and the Dinner Tables of Old New York -- 4. The Art of Being an Honoured Guest: The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country -- 5. 'Hungry Roaming': Dinners and Non-Dinners in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield -- 6. Through the Dining-Room Window: Perspectives of the Hostess in the Work of Mansfield and Woolf -- 7. The Art of Domesticity -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Works Consulted -- Index