- Title
- Making a meal of it: food as a symbol of degrees of fiction in the novels of Arthur Upfield
- Creator
- Franks, Rachel; Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Blood on the Table: Essays on Food in International Crime Fiction p. 150-162
- Publisher
- McFarland
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- If food is essential for survival, it is also critical to establishing, maintaining and handing on cultural practices and social identity. This essay looks at the criticality of food within crime fiction and, by extension, at the ways food can inform our understanding of the many different groups of peoples that populate these stories of mayhem and murder. We explore how food is utilized, in two of Arthur Upfield's Napoleon Bonaparte novels, to communicate ideas about class, gender, race and reflexivity. The first novel examined is An Author Bites the Dust (1948), a story that begins with Mervyn Blake, a famous Melbourne author and literary critic, giving a house party. The guests become quite distressed when their host is discovered dead in his study. The second novel is Man of Two Tribes (1956), which sees Bony trekking across the treacherous Nullarbor Plain, with two camels and a dog. His task is to locate a missing woman and suspected spy, Myra Thomas. Our essay then looks away from the consumption of food, to consider how the works of Arthur Upfield were consumed, or not, by the reading public.
- Subject
- Arthur Upfield; cultural practices; essay; Napolean Bonaparte
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1405361
- Identifier
- uon:35475
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781476632742
- Language
- eng
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