Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology of Major Works and Events
- Introduction: The Literature of Food
- 1 Medieval Feasts
- 2 The Art of Early Modern Cookery
- 3 The Romantic Revolution in Taste
- 4 The Matter of Early American Taste
- 5 The Culinary Landscape of Victorian Literature
- 6 Modernism and Gastronomy
- 7 Cold War Cooking
- 8 Farm Horror in the Twentieth Century
- 9 Queering the Cookbook
- 10 Guilty Pleasures in Children’s Literature
- 11 Postcolonial Tastes
- 12 Black Power in the Kitchen
- 13 Farmworker Activism
- 14 Digesting Asian America
- 15 Postcolonial Foodways in Contemporary African Literature
- 16 Blogging Food, Performing Gender
- Selected Guide to Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
6 - Modernism and Gastronomy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2020
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology of Major Works and Events
- Introduction: The Literature of Food
- 1 Medieval Feasts
- 2 The Art of Early Modern Cookery
- 3 The Romantic Revolution in Taste
- 4 The Matter of Early American Taste
- 5 The Culinary Landscape of Victorian Literature
- 6 Modernism and Gastronomy
- 7 Cold War Cooking
- 8 Farm Horror in the Twentieth Century
- 9 Queering the Cookbook
- 10 Guilty Pleasures in Children’s Literature
- 11 Postcolonial Tastes
- 12 Black Power in the Kitchen
- 13 Farmworker Activism
- 14 Digesting Asian America
- 15 Postcolonial Foodways in Contemporary African Literature
- 16 Blogging Food, Performing Gender
- Selected Guide to Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
Summary
This chapter connects the art and science of eating well known as gastronomy to the literary and social histories of modernism. It foregrounds how modernist writers both advance and satirize gastronomic principles of good taste and refined dining, and in doing so prompt explorations of popular versus high culture and nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. The analysis compares Italian avant-garde artist and writer F.T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook (1932), Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose volume (1946), and California culinary figure M.F.K. Fisher’s cookbooks from the 1940s. The Futurist Cookbook implicitly adapts the nationalism of nineteenth-century French gastronomy to the ideology of twentieth-century fascism by promoting technologically fabricated dishes and steel-like Italian citizens. In contrast, Niedecker’s New Goose uses lyric poetry to expose the hunger of small-scale farmers during the Second World War, a period when affluent gourmands continued to patronize urban restaurants. Finally, Fisher’s cookbooks employ modernist narrative techniques in the cookbook genre while expressing dissent with the broader status of gastronomy during wartime.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food , pp. 88 - 100Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020