Gazing Forward, Not Looking Back

Conventionally, children are depicted finding comfort in the sensory appeal of food, as part of experiences that eventually will become sources of adult nostalgia. Polly Horvath’s novels provide narratives that depict the creation of such moments without the accompanying nostalgia. This essay analyzes two of Horvath’s most successful and food-focused novels, Everything on a Waffle and The Canning Season, using the disciplinary and theoretical frames of children’s literature, food studies, social science research on comfort food as well as literary scholarship on nostalgia and on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, pursuing a counter-argument to the conventional view of children’s literature as a locus of nostalgia

Aesthetics · Appeal · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Discipline · Food studies · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Law · Psychology