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Best known for her culinary and domestic guides and the
award-winning short story "Mrs. Washington Potts," Eliza Leslie
deserves a much more prominent place in contemporary literary
discussions of the nineteenth century. Her writing, known for its
overtly moralistic and didactic tones--though often presented with
wit and humor--also provides contemporary readers with a nuanced
perspective for understanding the diversity among American women in
Leslie's time.
Leslie's writing serves as a commentary on gender ideals and
consumerism; presents complicated constructions of racial,
national, and class-based identities; and critiques literary genres
such as the Gothic romance and the love letter. These criticisms
are exposed through the juxtaposition of her fiction and nonfiction
instructive texts, which range from lessons on literary conduct to
needlework; from recipes for American and French culinary dishes to
travel sketches; from songs to educational games. Demonstrating the
complexity of choices available to women at the time, this volume
enables readers to see how Leslie's rhetoric and audience awareness
facilitated her ability to appeal to a broad swath of the
nineteenth-century reading public.
Perennially viewed as both a utopian land of abundant resources and
a fallen nation of consummate consumers, North America has provided
a fertile setting for the development of distinctive foodways
reflecting the diverse visions of life in the United States.
Immigrants, from colonial English Puritans and Spanish Catholics to
mid-twentieth-century European Jews and contemporary Indian Hindus,
have generated innovative foodways in creating "new world"
religious and ethnic identities. The Shakers, the Oneida
Perfectionists, and the Amana Colony, as well as 1970s
counter-cultural groups, developed food practices that
distinguished communal members from outsiders, but they also
marketed their food to nonmembers through festivals, restaurants,
and cookbooks. Other groups--from elite male dining clubs in
Revolutionary America and female college students in the late
1800s, to members of food co-ops; vegetarian Jews and Buddhists;
and "foodies" who watched TV cooking shows--have used food
strategically to promote their ideals of gender, social class,
nonviolence, environmentalism, or taste in the hope of transforming
national or global society. This theoretically informed,
interdisciplinary collection of thirteen essays broadens familiar
definitions of utopianism and community to explore the ways
Americans have produced, consumed, avoided, and marketed food and
food-related products and meanings to further their visionary
ideals.
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