Tarte a La Creme: Comedy and Gastronomy in Molieres Theater

By Ronald W. Tobin

Tarte a la Creme is the study of gastronomy in the work of a single French author. Moliere's comedies reflect the passion for cookery and the significance that alimentary metaphors attained in translating a variety of appetites, both individual and collective. To separate things culinary from the total structure of Moliere's plays would be to impoverish them. Beginning with an analysis of the codes of power and pleasure in Moliere's first high comedy, L'Ecole des Femmes, Tobin then studies taste in La Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes, communion in Don Juan, the exchange between host and guest in Amphitryon, malnutrition in L'Avare, the disguising of food and characters in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, philosophical anorexia in Les Femmes Savantes, and the spectacle of filthy lucre in Moliere's last play, Le Malade Imaginaire, which proves to be a bold attempt to shatter the linguistic, aesthetic, and moral boundaries of classical comedy.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814204937
• ISBN13: 9780814204931
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Ohio State Univ Pr
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.0" x 5.8"