Question

Text 1

Although food writing is one of the most widely read genres in the United States, literary scholars have long neglected it. And within this genre, cookbooks attract the least scholarly attention of all, regardless of how well written they may be. This is especially true of works dedicated to regional US cuisines, whose complexity and historical signifcance are often overlooked.

Text 2
With her 1976 cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking, Edna Lewis popularized the refned Southern cooking she had grown up with in Freetown, an all-Black community in Virginia. She also set a new standard for cookbook writing: the recipes and memoir passages interspersing them are written in prose more elegant than that of most novels. Yet despite its inarguable value as a piece of writing. Lewis's masterpiece has received almost no attention from literary scholars.

Based on the two texts, how would the author of Text 1 most likely regard the situation presented in the underlined sentence in Text 2?

Answer 1

The author of Text 1 would see Edna Lewis's lack of recognition by literary scholars as typical of the neglect of food writing and works detailing regional US cuisines. Lewis's work combines culinary art with elegant prose, representative of significant cultural narratives, consistently overlooked by academia.

Step-by-step explanation:

The author of Text 1 would likely view the situation presented in the underlined sentence of Text 2 as a clear example of the ongoing neglect of food writing within the literary scholarly community.

Given that Text 1 acknowledges the widespread popularity of food writing yet points out the lack of scholarly attention, especially towards regional cuisines, it is evident that the author would find Edna Lewis's situation unfortunately typical. Lewis's work, which intricately fuses narratives of Southern cooking with eloquent prose, exemplifies the depth and literary potential that scholars recurrently overlook.

Edna Lewis's The Taste of Country Cooking is not just a cookbook but a piece of regional and cultural history. The author of Text 1 would most likely recognize Lewis's contribution to regional US cuisines and the unfortunate disparity between the quality of writing Lewis achieved and the scholarly attention it failed to garner. This neglect mirrors the broader trend where literary scholars have marginalized entire genres of writing, such as cookbooks, regardless of their literary merit or the rich cultural context they provide.