La gastronomia e la letteratura

Abstract

The first part of this essay discusses the relationship between gastronomy and literature in a theoretical way: it presents all the arguments put forward to establish a strong correlation between “écriture gastronomique” and “écriture littéraire” – a correlation which seems to be natural, but is nevertheless the result of a sociocultural evolution. Subsequently, the article analyses another kind of relationship – the general interrelation of literature and social reality, because fictional texts always react to a society, which authors portray through a deforming mirror in order to influence their public. In the second part, these theoretical conclusions will be applied to concrete subject matter: the realistic and naturalistic novel of the French Nineteenth century, called “le siècle bourgeois”. Authors like Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Maupassant imitate the “discours gastronomique” of their period, sometimes in an affirmative way, but often with a critical intention. As an example, this essay examines the representation of the two places of gastronomical consumption: the restaurant as the public area, and the dining room as the private sphere of bourgeois eating culture.