Edible Arrangements: Modernism's Queer Forms

By: Elizabeth Blake

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Synopsis: In Edible Arrangements, Elizabeth Blake explores the way modernist writing about eating delves into larger questions about bodily and literary pleasure. Drawing on insights from the field of food studies, she makes dual interventions into queer theory and modernist studies: first, locating an embrace of queerness within modernist depictions of the pleasure of eating, and second, showing how this queer consumption shapes modernist notions of literary form, expanding and reshaping conventional genres. Drawing from a promiscuous archive that cuts across boundaries of geography and canonicity, Blake demonstrates how modernist authors draw on this consuming queerness to restructure a range of literary forms. Each chapter constellates a set of seemingly disparate writers working in related modes—such as the satirical writings of Richard Bruce Nugent, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield—in order to demonstrate how writing about eating can both unsettle the norms of bodily pleasure and those of genre itself.