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The book is the first to analyse the textual construction of a
national Spanish cuisine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. This book looks at the textual attempts to construct a
national cuisine made in Spain at the turn of the last century. At
the same time that attempts to unify the country were being made in
law and narrated in fiction, Mariano Pardo de Figueroa (1828-1918)
and Jose Castro y Serrano (1829-96), Angel Muro Goiri (1839 -
1897), Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1921) and Dionisio Perez
(1872-1935) all tried to find ways of bringing Spaniards together
through a common language about food. In line with this nationalist
goal, all of the texts examined in this book contain strategies and
rhetoric typical of nineteenth-century nation-building projects.
The nationalist agenda of these culinary textscomes as little
surprise when we consider the importance of nation building to
Spanish cultural and political life at the time of their
publication. At this time Spaniards were forced to confront many
questions relating to their national identity, such as the state's
lackluster nationalizing policies, the loss of empire, national
degeneration and regeneration and their country's cultural
dependence on France. In their discussions about how to nationalize
Spanish food, all of the authors under consideration here tap into
these wider political and cultural issues about what it meant to be
Spanish at this time. Lara Anderson is Lecturer in Spanish Studies
at the Universityof Melbourne.
Control and Resistance reveals the various ways in which food
writing of the early Franco era was a potent political tool,
producing ways of eating and thinking about food that privileged
patriotism over personal desire. The author examines a diverse
range of official and non-official food texts to highlight how
discourse helped construct and contest identities in line with the
three ideological pillars of the regime: autarky, prescriptive
gender roles, and monolithic nationalism. Official food discourse
produced an audience with a taste for local foodstuffs, and also
created a unified gastronomic space in which regional cuisines were
co-opted for the purposes of culinary nationalism. The author
discusses a genre of official texts directed solely at women, which
demanded women's compliance and exclusive dedication to
domesticity. Alongside such examples, Control and Resistance
includes texts that offered resistance to the Franco hegemony. Food
texts have traditionally been viewed as apolitical because of their
connections with domesticity, so they were not subject to the same
degree of censorship as other published works. Accordingly, food
writing was at times more capable of offering disruptive or
resistant textual spaces than other forms of discourse.
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