Descrizione del progetto
Nutrizione infantile nel XIX secolo
La malnutrizione infantile è una preoccupazione urgente per la salute, ma le sue origini risalgono alla fine del XIX secolo in Europa, quando anche le culture alimentari in tutto il continente hanno contribuito a formulare identità nazionali. Il programma Feeding, Education Dieting, finanziato dall’UE, altrimenti noto con l’acronimo FED, si concentra su un’analisi qualitativa comparata delle relazioni sulla malnutrizione nella letteratura per l’infanzia in Gran Bretagna e in Italia tra il 1850 e il 1900. Le relazioni del progetto sono incentrate sulle caratteristiche principali di personaggi che mangiano e muoiono di fame, trasmettendo anche discorsi dominanti sul ruolo di genere, sull’influenza sociale e sulla salute nel corpo e nella mente. Il progetto contribuirà ad affrontare le attuali questioni europee sulla malnutrizione infantile, promuovendo collaborazioni internazionali nella ricerca.
Obiettivo
‘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.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinatore
30123 Venezia
Italia