| Summary: | This thesis examines Barbara Pym's treatment of a critically-documented theme, food, as it intersects with gender within her oeuvre. By mapping the subversive quality that her fiction achieves through the ironic exposition of cultural myths relating to food and its gender implications, it offers an alternative critical perspective on Pym, formulated in opposition to the traditionalist hegemony that seeks to 'protect' her from feminists. The study begins by exploring the historical and material conditions of Pym's rejection and 're-discovery', and the invention of her reputation by her literary guardians, in order to identify the subtleties of Pym's political sensibility and to provide a feminist-cultural theoretical reading of it. As Pym's life had an immediate and constitutive effect on the form and content of her work, Chapter 2 examines archival material which forms the basis of a psycho-sexual reading of her personal relationship to food, particularly as it symbolises or substitutes for desire. Chapters 3 and 4 provide close readings of her novels, examining the relationship ofPym's women and men to food, revealing how the dialogue between women and food figures as a metonym of desire, and is often the source of abjection, while for men food acts as both sexual metaphor and a metonymic site of power. These chapters are developed through a feminist socio-anthropological filter, offering an overview of foodway rules as they encode gender conventions and their supporting mythologies. This informs an analysis of Pym's fiction that considers how she chronicles English middle-class 'tribal customs' contemporary with her fifty years of writing, based upon the evidence of her familiarity with anthropological theory and technique. The inquiry into the thematic importance of food in Pym's fiction reveals how she ironises the cultural myths which mark gender difference and support a gender hierarchy. Since it engages with contemporary critical debate about and within feminist literary theory and gender studies, it offers both a much-needed re-evaluation of Pym's texts and a critical revision of what does and should comprise a feminist canon.
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