Following on from my last post on Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge , I’m staying on the other side of the Atlantic for this one too: The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris. Continue reading “The modern American male”
Tag: short story
Christmas Cake 2020
When I previously posted about Christmas cake it was in relation to Jane Eyre. In Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel, Jane’s making of a Christmas cake for her newly discovered family, the Rivers, demonstrates both her new wealth and the fact she has found her identity and at last feels she belongs somewhere. Continue reading “Christmas Cake 2020”
Food and feminism
Not surprisingly as the literature I’ve written about has moved into the domestic sphere (early 19th century onwards), so the food described has tended to be prepared by women. Whether it be Charlotte Lucas’s mince pies in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the dinner party prepared in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or the welsh cakes made by Evans the Death’s mother in Under Milk Wood, it is largely women who are responsible for the food preparation. Continue reading “Food and feminism”