Edible Arrangements
Modernism's Queer Forms

Bringing together the fields of queer theory, modernist studies, and food studies, this book intervenes into debates about literary form.

Elizabeth Blake (Author)

9781009321228, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 August 2023

236 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2 cm, 0.5 kg

'While Blake's book focuses on modernist literature, her analysis of how it depicts embodied relationships with and through food certainly applies to other forms of experimental queer art. This is the mark of a great academic text: when its ideas can illuminate new ways of understanding objects beyond its purview.' Lauren Herold, Autostraddle

In Edible Arrangements, Elizabeth Blake explores the way modernist writing about eating delves into larger questions about bodily and literary pleasure. Drawing on insights from the field of food studies, she makes dual interventions into queer theory and modernist studies: first, locating an embrace of queerness within modernist depictions of the pleasure of eating, and second, showing how this queer consumption shapes modernist notions of literary form, expanding and reshaping conventional genres. Drawing from a promiscuous archive that cuts across boundaries of geography and canonicity, Blake demonstrates how modernist authors draw on this consuming queerness to restructure a range of literary forms. Each chapter constellates a set of seemingly disparate writers working in related modes—such as the satirical writings of Richard Bruce Nugent, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield—in order to demonstrate how writing about eating can both unsettle the norms of bodily pleasure and those of genre itself.

1. Introduction: in the mouth
2. Bad taste: satire and the senses
3. Hunger and lust: obscenity in Joyce, Barnes, and Tagore
4. Commensality and theatricality at the dinner party
5. Feeding and figuration: reimagining the mother and child.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]