12th Annual Graduate Conference on Language and Literature
McGill University, Montreal
Theme: Permeability and Selfhood
March 11-12, 2006
This call for papers is for a panel to be held at Permeability and
Selfhood, the McGill Graduate Conference on Language and Literature,
which will take place March 11-12 at McGill University, Montreal,
Quebec, Canada.

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Much Depends on Dinner: Consumption in the Nineteenth Century

The penetrability of the body through the mouth carries both negative
and positive implications: for Mikhail Bakhtin, it represents the
promise of growth and community; for Julia Kristeva, it poses a threat
to the "clean and proper body" that guarantees identity. The things
we put in our mouths can produce, complicate, and transform who we
are. Thus, food and drink operate as a system of signs indexed to
multiple layers of identity, and they play an especially important
role in the literature, art and culture of the nineteenth century.

Beyond recipes, for instance, Mrs. Beeton's famous cookbook Household
Management (1859-1861) models a particular brand of middle-class
domestic femininity. While Dr. Redgill in Susan Ferrier's Marriage
(1818) pronounces the appetite "the best part of us," other
nineteenth-century texts, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897),
Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" (1862) George Gissing's The Odd
Women (1893), and Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions (1822) are vivid
reminders that having too much appetite or consuming the wrong thing
–- blood, forbidden fruit, intoxicating substances –- leads to
degradation and disease.

This panel will explore how and to what extent eating, drinking, and
related activities are productive of or threatening to individual and
group identities. Interdisciplinarity is encouraged. The deadline for
paper proposals is January 5, 2006. Send abstracts (approximately 300
words) to heather.mcalpine_at_gmail.com.

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Received on Tue Nov 08 2005 - 17:12:53 EST