La « gastrolittérature » comme discours identitaire de la modernité. Deux exemples

Abstract

The gastronomic discourse is tremendously important in the construction of a national identity, and the famous French gastronome Brillat-Savarin expresses it explicitly:“tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you
who you are”. But how you write about what you eat is also very important, and this discourse about eating is clearly an expression of modernity. What does gastroliterature mean and why famous writers chose to write about food and eating manners in an epoque where nations began to define themselves
in the context of early modernity? How exactly did the discourse about eating helped in defining nations in the XIXth century and which are the reference points of this new type of literature? In order to answer all these questions we chose to analyse two situations: the one in France, the country in which the gastronomic discourse was born, and the one in Romania, greatly influenced by the French model.