CFP: Eating and Orality in the Life and Work of Edith Wharton (11/15; ALA, 5/25-5/28)

From: Donna Campbell (campbell@GONZAGA.EDU)
Date: Sun Sep 19 1999 - 00:59:31 EDT


Call for Papers

Eating and Orality in the Life and Work of Edith Wharton

American Literature Association Conference
Long Beach, CA May 25-28, 2000

Cynthia Griffin Wolff has attributed to Edith Wharton an "infantile sense of
unsatisfied, insatiable oral longing." Whether or not such a longing
manifests itself in Wharton's fiction and other writings is open to
debate, but as both a hostess and a novelist of manners she undeniably
brought together some of literature's most memorable diners, dinners, and
dining rooms. In addition to the oral personality and oral sexuality in
Wharton's life and work, possible topics for this panel include
culinary taste and table manners as motifs in Wharton's fiction; Wharton's
own aesthetic of dining as conveyed in her autobiographies and the
_Decoration of Houses_; connections between culinary and other kinds of
taste, gourmandism and sexual appetite, abstemiousness and control; food
loathings, cravings, and eating disorders; the club dining room or
restaurant as setting; the function of informal, such as _al fresco_,
meals; the table as a site of struggle and seduction; class, gender, and
ethnic differences in attitudes towards food.

Please send 1-2 page abstracts by November 15, 1999 to

Elizabeth Keyser
PO Box 9674
Hollins University
Roanoke, VA 24020

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