Title: Food Writing and the Construction of Southern Community in The Golden Christmas

Abstract: In The Golden Christmas, set against the backdrop of antebellum Southern plantations, Simms’s food writing serves as a key to decoding his ideology of community. Food choices and preferences of the main characters reflect the cultural exclusivity in the early phase of the construction of Southern nationalism, constituting a literary reproduction of provincialism and posing significant obstacles to community building. Meanwhile, food sharing at Christmas feasts evokes a sense of community and fosters reconciliation through concrete enjoyment. In the context of 19th-century racial politics, food is also intertwined with Simms’s ideas of slavery, alienated into an ideological tool to whitewash the exploitative order of the plantation and maintain the racial hierarchy of the Southern community.

Keywords: 19th-century American Literature, The Golden Christmas, food writing, southern community, slavery, hierarchical order

Authors: Jiexin Yi, Associate Professor, College of Language Culture and Communication, Hunan University of Technology, Zhuzhou, Hunan, China; Shuqi Tian, College of Language Culture and Communication, Hunan University of Technology, Zhuzhou, Hunan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.01.015