| Abstrakt: |
Food and eating are recurring themes throughout Laura Richards's children's poems. This essay examines how several of Richards's poems bring together food and education, specifically in conjunction with excess, grotesquerie, and otherness. Reading foods as gesturing beyond themselves and as signifying on social relations, I argue that excessive food consumption and the ingestion of "wrong" foods are tied to a warning of greed and over-indulgence and to discouraging ambitions to transgress social boundaries in terms of race and class. By discussing choice poems, I show how the excesses of food, physical violations of bodies, and nonsense allow the poems to issue racist and classist warnings without unleashing the possibility of violence into their white readership's reality, when they dissolve the chaos of excess in and on the distanced body of the animal or the racial Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
