Description du projet
L’alimentation des enfants au 19e siècle
La malnutrition infantile est un problème de santé urgent, mais ses origines remontent à la fin du 19e siècle en Europe, lorsque les cultures alimentaires sur ce continent ont également permis l’expression des identités nationales. Le programme Feeding, Education Dieting, financé par l’UE, également connu sous son acronyme FED, est axé sur une analyse qualitative comparative des récits de malnutrition dans la littérature jeunesse en Grande‑Bretagne et en Italie entre 1850 et 1900. Les récits du projet sont centrés sur les caractéristiques de base des personnages qui se nourrissent et s’affament, en transmettant également un discours dominant sur le rôle de genre, l’influence sociale et la santé physique et mentale. Ce projet aidera à répondre aux questions européennes actuelles sur la malnutrition infantile, en promouvant des collaborations internationales dans la recherche.
Objectif
‘Feeding, Educating, Dieting’ (FED) is a comparative qualitative analysis of mal/nutrition narratives, i.e. images of characters eating/fasting, in 1850-1900 British and Italian children's literature. Adopting a new historicist and discourse theory approach to comparative reading of British and Italian narratives, the project examines nineteenth-century trans/national discourses about child mal/nutrition and assesses children’s literature’s role in circulating these discourses.
Child mal/nutrition is an increasingly concerning health issue in Europe, which prompted the EU to draw the Action Plan on Childhood Obesity 2014-2020. Concern for this transnational issue can be traced back to the late-Nineteenth century, a definitional moment for national identities. Countries with different histories and food cultures addressed the idea of growing a healthy nation looking at the raising middle-class values in a process that engaged food, health, and literature. Using England and Italy as a case study, FED examines a selection of 1850-1900 Italian and British narratives to develop a framework to analyse the circulation of nineteenth-century child mal/nutrition discourses through children's fiction, highlighting their transnational nature. This framework will outline the core features of characters eating/starving in the selected narratives and unpack how these conveyed dominant discourses about gender roles, social power, and the healthy body/mind.
As an expert in the application of new historicism and discourse theory to Victorian fiction, in FED I apply my main theoretical framework to the traditional comparative approach used in children’s literature studies to increase our understanding of how literature and food culture merge in national identity discourses. On a larger scale, FED promotes discussion on how literary studies can address current European issues such as child mal/nutrition and promotes international collaborative research on the topic.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinateur
30123 Venezia
Italie