French Literature Reviews - 2026
Writing the Meal. Fragments of a Gastronomic Discourse.
Other Literary Studies
Writing the Meal
Fragments of a Gastronomic Discourse
Studies edited by Karin Becker and Olivier Leplatre
Peter Lang, 2007
ISBN 978-3-631-56354-0
282 pages, 6 illustrations
44.90€
This collective volume explores the relationship between literature and food. Until now, literary research has been quite hesitant to examine the modes of writing related to alimentary practices. This volume thus contributes to the ongoing rehabilitation of a subject rarely addressed by literary criticism, drawing, as this work proposes, on the transdisciplinary contributions of the human sciences. The thirteen articles analyze gastronomic writing across various types of discourse over a period stretching from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. The subtitle alludes to Roland Barthes, for whom food itself constitutes a code, dependent on enunciation and the rules of signification. The meal is a phenomenon where all food signs intersect in a meaningful way. The contributors set out to examine how descriptive strategies display continuities and ruptures from one century to the next.
Contents
Karin Becker/Olivier Leplatre: Introduction: "To write the history of gastronomy is to write the history of a literature"
- Jean-François Kosta-Théfaine: From the Cookbook to the "Total Art": French Culinary Literature of the Middle Ages
- Aurélie Barre: Ink Hosts in "Renart et Primaut" (Branch XIII of the Roman de Renart)
- Jean-Claude Mühlethaler: Wine between Morality and Carnival: François Villon and Jean Molinet
- Jean-Pierre Landry: Molière's The School for Wives and The Learned Ladies, or Forbidden Feasts
- Marine Ricord: "Everything that nourishes me": Meal Stories in the Letters of Madame de Sévigné
- Cyril Francès: Flesh and the Carnal: Casanova's Sensual Gastronomy
- Paul Junod/Olivier Leplatre: The So-Called Cherry Idyll (Book IV of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions) - "Cherries fall where texts are missing." The Cherry: A Little Literary and Pictorial Carpology
- Karin Becker: The Erotic Meal in Baudelaire's La Fanfarlo
- Pierre Michel: Gastronomy or Barbarism: Around the Physiology of Taste and the Maison rustique des Dames
- Patrick Laudet: Dietetics and Mysticism in In Search of Lost Time: Dipping the Madeleine and Making the Rock Flow
- Alain Drouard: The Cuisine of Georges Simenon
- Astrid Bouygues: Animal Self-Consumption in 20th-Century Poetry: A Poetics of the Anti-Meal?
About the Editors
Karin Becker is Privatdozentin at the University of Münster and Associate Professor at the University of Luxembourg. She has published several works on French literature of the Middle Ages and the 17th, 19th, and 20th centuries, as well as her habilitation thesis on gastronomy in the 19th-century novel.
Olivier Leplatre is Senior Lecturer at Jean Moulin University Lyon 3. He has published works on 17th-century literature (La Fontaine, Molière), as well as on Apollinaire, "short forms," and the telephone in 20th-century arts.
The study of gastronomy within literary history has often been hesitant, yet it addresses how alimentary practices relate to modes of writing. By treating the meal as a phenomenon where food signs intersect, researchers examine how food constitutes a code dependent on enunciation and rules of signification. This volume situates itself within the tradition of literary studies, engaging with the idea that food acts as a code. It explores how authors from the medieval period through the 20th century have employed descriptive strategies to examine continuities and ruptures in gastronomic writing.
The contributors to this volume investigate the intersection of food and language, referencing the semiotic approach associated with Roland Barthes. By analyzing various types of discourse—including culinary literature, letters, novels, and poetry—the essays examine gastronomic writing and its relationship to themes such as morality, sensuality, and dietetics. The collection examines how various authors have navigated the tension between the physical reality of the meal and its symbolic representation. Readers interested in the history of culinary discourse and its development across different centuries may find this volume relevant.