Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature

<p><em>Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature</em> is the first scholarly volume on the topic, connecting children's literature to the burgeoning discipline of food studies. Following the lead of historians like Mark Kurlansky, Jeffrey Pilcher and Massimo Montanari, who use food as a fundamental node for understanding history, the essays in this volume present food as a multivalent signifier in children’s literature, and make a strong argument for its central place in literature and literary theory. </p><p>Written by some of the most respected scholars in the field, the essays between these covers tackle texts from the nineteenth century (Rudyard Kipling’s Kim) to the contemporary (Dave Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series), the U.S. multicultural (Asian-American) to the international (Ireland, Brazil, Mexico). Spanning genres such as picture books, chapter books, popular media, and children’s cookbooks, contributors utilize a variety of approaches, including archival research, cultural studies, formalism, gender studies, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, race studies, structuralism, and theology. Innovative and wide-ranging, Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature provides us with a critical opportunity to puzzle out the significance of food in children’s literature.</p> <p>Series Editor’s Foreword</p><p>Acknowledgments </p><p>Part I. Introduction </p><p>1. Introduction</p><p>Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard</p><p>Part II. Reading as Cooking</p><p>2. Delicious Supplements: Literary Cookbooks as Additives to Children’s Texts</p><p>Jodie Slothower and Jan Susina</p><p>Part III. Girls, Mothers, Children</p><p>3. Recipe for Reciprocity and Repression: The Politics of Cooking and Consumption in Girls’ Coming-of-Age Literature</p><p>Holly Blackford</p><p>4. The Apple of her Eye: The Mothering Ideology Fed by Bestselling Trade Picture Books</p><p>Lisa Rowe Fraustino</p><p>Part IV. Food and the Body</p><p>5. Nancy Drew and the "F" Word</p><p>Leona W. Fisher</p><p>6. To Eat and Be Eaten in Nineteenth-century Children’s Literature</p><p>Jacqueline M. Labbe</p><p>7. Voracious Appetites: The Construction of "Fatness" in the Boy Hero in English Children’s Literature</p><p>Jean Webb</p><p>Part V. Global/Multicultural/Post-colonial Food</p><p>8. "The Eaters of Everything": Etiquettes of Empire in Kipling’s Narratives of Imperial Boys</p><p>Winnie Chan</p><p>9. Eating Different, Looking Different: Food in the Asian-American Childhood</p><p>Lan Dong</p><p>10. The Potato Eaters: Food Collection in Irish Famine Literature for Children</p><p>Karen Hill McNamara</p><p>11. The Keys to the Kitchen: Cooking and Latina Power in Latin(o) American Children’s Stories</p><p>Genny Ballard</p><p>12. Sugar or Spice? The Flavor of Gender Self-Identity in an Example of Brazilian Children’s Literature</p><p>Richard Vernon</p><p>Part VI. Through Food the/a Self</p><p>13. Oranges of Paradise: The Orange as Symbol of Escape and Loss in Children’s Literature</p><p>James Everett</p><p>14. Trials of Taste: Ideological "Food Fights" in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time</p><p>Elizabeth Gargano</p><p>15. A Consuming Tradition: Candy and Socio-religious Identity Formation in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory</p><p>Robert M. Kachur</p><p>16. Prevailing Culinary, Psychological, and Metaphysical Conditions: Meatballs and Reality</p><p>Martha Satz</p><p>17. "The Attack of the Inedible Hunk!": Food, Language, and Power in the Captain Underpants Series</p><p>Annette Wannamaker</p><p>Contributors</p><p>Index</p>