Cooking the books: comparing and contrasting works of contemporary culinary-oriented French literature

It is without question that France considers itself a country of gastronomes. The importance and general acceptance of cuisine as an essential part of French identity is evident in that "gastronomy" has earned its place in Pierre Nora's Les Lieux de memoire. Given this connection, it is unsurprising that many French and Francophone writers are drawn to the culinary for the symbolic richness and semantic wealth that food can offer. Food has always been a topic of discussion in French literary studies. However, a closer look at more recently published works is now merited given the explosion of activity and interest in the field.;When considering the relationship between Anglophone food writing and French cuisine, we tend to think of expatriate lives, memoirs of culinary professionals, or books intended to raise awareness about food politics and food systems. However, in the Francophone world, there is a growing community of authors creating a small but distinct field of culinary-oriented literature that challenges perceptions of gastronomic writing as being only autobiographical, journalistic, technical, or memoirist in nature. Through the culinary, these authors reflect, refract, and interact with established modes and tropes found in modern and postmodern literary discourse. In doing so, they are producing a markedly different way to approach how we talk about what we eat, how we eat, who we are, and how we write about it.;In this dissertation, I focus primarily on three authors who are in the vanguard of this new kind of food writing: Maryline Desbiolles, Chantal Thomas, and Allen S. Weiss. What all three of these authors share is how they reconceive the relationship between themselves and their readers through the culinary. What ultimately emerges is something new: self-conscious, self-aware, and self-reflexive works in which cuisine functions an allegory for the creative process and for writing itself. In these works, the relationship between the subject and food --- the preparation, consumption, obsession with, rejection of, or reaction to a specific item or dish --- shows the special role that food can play in the representation of our most intimate selves and our relationship with the world.