Women’s Imaginary Cooking and Appetites Across Cultures

Studies in Literature, Media and Film

Edited By: Dana Bădulescu, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Florina Năstase

£77.99

This book explores the cultural implications of women’s engagement with food, tackling the female body, appetites, culinary witchcraft, magic, and cannibalism. It traces how food disorders are alchemically transformed into aesthetics, with a pivotal focus on the Balkans.

This book delves into the cultural implications of women’s engagement with food and cooking. In doing this, it also tackles related issues such as the…

This book delves into the cultural implications of women’s engagement with food and cooking. In doing this, it also tackles related issues such as the female body, women’s appetites, and imaginary projections of their own displacement, exile, (dis)orderly behaviour(s), culinary witchcraft, magic and cannibalism. From food disorders, the book veers onto how they are transcended and alchemically transformed into food aesthetics and poetics. Thus, it invites scholars, students and a wider public interested in an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to women’s studies, food studies and media studies to explore the complexity, diversity and shiftiness of food cultures and women’s engagement in food practices. What makes this collection of essays stand out is its focus on the Balkans (and particularly Romania) as a pivotal point in a comparative cross-cultural discussion.

Dana Bădulescu is a Professor in the Department of English at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, Romania. Her latest book is Rushdie’s Cross-pollinations (2023). Her essay “‘Cooking Imaginary Meals.’ Aesthetics of Food in the Modernist Narratives of Two Rivalling Friends: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield” (2022) is a prelude to this book.

Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru is an Associate Professor of American Studies and postcolonialism at the University of Bucharest, Romania. Her latest books are Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English (2015); Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture: Between Cultural Memory and Transmediality (co-edited with Dragoș Manea, 2021).

Florina Năstase is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi. She authored the book Confession and Poetry: Female Confessionalism in Twentieth-Century America (2022) and several papers in the fields of American studies, gender studies, and British and American modernism and postmodernism.

Laura-Victoria Stoica, Balagopal S. Menon, Anomitra Biswas, Mariana Codrut, Stephanie Couey, Christine D’Anca, Rituparna Das, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Emanuela Ilie, Heidi Oberholtzer Lee, Athira Mohan, Florina Năstase, Lucy O’Connor, Ioana Pârvulescu, Virginia Petrica, Alina Preda, Ruth Mariana Ramirez Adame, Doina Rusti, Ananya Saha, Maria Stehle, Laura-Victoria Stoica