Food and Emotions in Italian Women's Writing: A Reassessment

by Patrizia Sambuco

Overview

Food and Emotions in Italian Women’s Writing discusses the relevance of food imagery in the writing of Italian women over a period of one hundred years, from the 1920s to the present day, while offering new ways to narrate women’s history and creativity. In this groundbreaking work, Patrizia Sambuco shows how food imagery in different historical periods challenge established political discourses by conveying unexpressed, alternative, or transgressive emotions.

Through literary analysis, archival research, and philosophical approaches to the senses, emotions, and food, the book considers a variety of authors, from the celebrated to the hardly known. Sambuco argues that in different ways, throughout the decades, the conceptual domain of food has helped express forms of selfhood that push the boundaries of womanhood and interact with cultural and political panoramas at national and international levels. Building an alternative history of Italian women and their creativity, Sambuco shows how the interplay of the senses and emotions becomes a profitable way to illuminate overlooked aspects of women’s subjectivity. Food and Emotions in Italian Women's Writing ultimately reassesses women’s writing, giving value to the marginality of women’s bodies and positions through the conceptual domain of food.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487506834
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	11/29/2024
Series:	Toronto Italian Studies
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Patrizia Sambuco is the editor of Transmissions of Memory and Italian Women Writers, 1800–2000 and the author of Corporeal Bonds.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Fascism, Food, and the Senses

2. The Second World War, Food, and Women’s Bodies

3. The Politicization of the Everyday

4. The Third Millennium: Food as Relationships

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

“Patrizia Sambuco’s new book is a timely, insightful investigation of a century of Italian women’s writing in genres as diverse as cookbooks, memoirs, letters, journalism, and fiction, but it is much more than literary criticism. A truly interdisciplinary enterprise, this book will be required reading for students of culture, philosophy, history, economics, art, science, food, women, gender, and war.”—Paula Schwartz, Lois B. Watson Professor Emerita of French Studies, Middlebury College
“Exploring the relationship between food and emotions in Italian women writers, Patrizia Sambuco presents an innovative and stimulating approach to a relatively neglected field.”—Diego Zancani, Emeritus Professor of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford
“This intriguing book performs a sophisticated historical and literary analysis of how diverse Italian female writers from the 1920s to the present have used food to express emotions, define transgressive identities, and challenge political hierarchies. Focusing on Italian women’s memoirs, poetry, fiction, and cookbooks during Fascism, World War II, the 1970s, and the contemporary postcolonial migration context, the book shows how food is a subversive and historically specific channel for Italian women’s personal and political expression.”—Carole Counihan, author of Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence and Editor-in-Chief, Food and Foodways

From the Publisher