Significant Food is a collaborative work of textual analysis and criticism that chews on the role and prominence of food in American literature. The volume offers close readings of many well-known, and some less well-known, examples of American writing, as studied through the food culture sensibilities of a well-stocked cupboard of contributors who offer their analyses for public consumption.
Editors Jeff Birkenstein and Robert C. Hauhart find that literary criticism has focused on the role food plays in literary production to a greater extent than recognized at first glance and that its role has become increasingly common only in the last two decades. Still, while there is critical commentary regarding authors' use of food across the expanse of American literature, there has been a lack of a unifying critical theory to guide these analyses. Birkenstein and Hauhart offer the theory of "significant food"-a method that asks literary critics to evaluate and assess the extent, nature, and role that food plays in literary production. When food and "food moments" are used intensively and "significantly" within the drama, memoir, poem, novel, short story, or other writing, then one can say that it has achieved a status that makes it indispensable to the work at hand.
"Significant Food is an interesting collection on food and eating in twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature. Its contributors collectively reveal that the alimentary has been put into a variety of uses."
Maria Christou
"Significant Food offers critical readings of a refreshing mix of classic and contemporary texts, known and lesser-known ones, including genre fiction. The chapters offer new insights into fictional texts through the lens of food."
