Conclusion

Abstract

Leftovers concludes as it begins: by identifying the untapped interpretative potential in representations of eating and drinking. It recalls how the critical approaches re-thought in terms of leftovers in Chapter 1 are used in new ways and combinations to explore representations of food and drink in the literary case studies. Writing, reading and feeding emerge as simultaneously ambivalent and transformative processes, which always exceed intentions, spanning the symbolic and the material and evoking leftovers of psychology, ideology and identity. As well as insights into the sample of critical and literary texts (and into post-war France), there are new understandings of the effects of gender, race and class power relations, of unregulated excess and of the impossibility of escaping leftovers of language, desire and repressed traumas. Necessarily only a taste of re-thinking with leftovers, the book offers a springboard for interdisciplinary developments across and beyond comparative, cultural, ecocritical, film, food, gender, modern languages and literary studies. Leftovers offers creative, critical inspiration to explore other theoretical and aesthetic projects which use or are legible through food and drink, enabling a re-thinking of the roles that eating and drinking may play in any kind of representational practice, historical or contemporary, from across the world.