This book focuses on the fiction of four postcolonial authors: V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie. It argues that meals in their novels act as sites where the relationships between the individual subject and the social identities of race, class and gender are enacted. Drawing upon a variety of academic fields and disciplines - including postcolonial theory, historical research, food studies and recent attempts to rethink the concept of world literature - it dedicates a chapter to each author, tracing the literary, cultural and historical contexts in which their texts are located and exploring the ways in which food and the act of eating acquire meanings and how those meanings might clash, collide and be disputed. Not only does this book offer suggestive new readings of the work of its four key authors, but it challenges the reader to consider the significance of food in postcolonial fiction more generally.
Paul Vlitos is Senior Lecturer in the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey, UK, where he is Programme Leader for the English Literature with Creative Writing BA. His previous critical writing has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Textual Practice, several edited collections and the TLS.
1. Introduction: Ways of Reading a Meal.- 2. 'Our Little Bastard World': Food, History and Identity in the Novels of V.S. Naipaul.- 3. 'It was Actually Wonderful to See What Fertile Ground the Dining Table was for Discussion and Debate': Food, Gender and Culture in the Novels of Anita Desai.- 4. Stereotypes, Family Values, and Chop Suey: Food, Authority and Authenticity in the Novels of Timothy Mo.- 5. The Chutnification of History and the Limits of Gastronomic Pluralism: Food, Identity and the Commodification of Culture in the Novels of Salman Rushdie.- 6. Conclusion.
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