عنوان

'Tell me what you eat' :

Number

TLets583907

Title Proper

'Tell me what you eat' :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Boyce, Charlotte

Title Proper by Another Author

representations of food in nineteenth century culture

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Cardiff University

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2006

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

Cardiff University

Text preceding or following the note

2006

Text of Note

Drawing upon the poststructuralist theories of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan, this thesis analyses the multiple significations attached to food in nineteenth-century culture, and the art and literature of the Victorian bourgeoisie in particular. Chapter one utilises Lacanian theories of vision and desire in order to suggest that nineteenth-century representations of food are frequently caught up in a politics of display, constituting a feast for the eyes as well as the palate. It goes on to argue that the preoccupation with display in the middle-class dining room reveals something of the nature of bourgeois desire, as well as the fundamental instability of subjectivity. Chapter two examines the class-specific locations in which food was consumed, focusing on the special status accorded to the dining room in bourgeois culture. It also suggests that the picnic - a phenomenon which transported the middle classes outside of the security of the domestic realm - holds a disruptive, disorderly potential in representation, which ultimately undoes the inside/outside binary used to order Victorian eating spaces. Chapter three considers the relationship between food and nation in nineteenth-century art and literature, arguing that racial and cultural others are often portrayed in terms of food, functioning simultaneously as objects of desire - appetising dishes to enhance the white, British palate - and sources of anxiety, having a destabilising effect upon the hegemonic cultural identity when 'consumed'. Considered collectively, these chapters demonstrate that the act of eating is by no means an innocent one. Freighted with cultural significations both manifest and covert, caught up in complex networks of meaning relating to hierarchies of gender, race and class, food and its associated practices work to construct, as well as to nourish, the consuming subject.

Boyce, Charlotte

Cardiff University

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y