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Chapter 15 - Toast and the Familiar in Children’s Literature

from Part III - Applications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

Gitanjali G. Shahani
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University
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Summary

Buttered toast appears frequently in Anglophone children’s literature.  In its very familiarity, buttered toast might seem to be the perfect comestible to sum up the Golden Age of Children’s Literature: it calls to mind the Victorian nursery, or at least a vision of that nursery that has been created precisely through such representations, yet it is recognizable to many a young reader today, creating another filament of connection between reader and characters and drawing the reader into the imagined world. In this chapter, I make the familiarity of toast a question rather than an assumption, focusing on toast in The Wind in the Willows (1908), Mary Poppins (1934), the Harry Potter series (1997-2007) and A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2006).  To what extent does toast connect readers across time and place and to what extent is it becoming an exotic comestible, a food in need of a gloss?  
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Food and Literature , pp. 287 - 302
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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