Food and Emotions in Italian Women’s Writing

Food and Emotions in Italian Women’s Writing discusses the relevance of food imagery in the writing of Italian women over a period of one hundred years, from the 1920s to the present day, while offering new ways to narrate women’s history and creativity. In this groundbreaking work, Patrizia Sambuco shows how food imagery in different historical periods challenge established political discourses by conveying unexpressed, alternative, or transgressive emotions.

Through literary analysis, archival research, and philosophical approaches to the senses, emotions, and food, the book considers a variety of authors, from the celebrated to the hardly known. Sambuco argues that in different ways, throughout the decades, the conceptual domain of food has helped express forms of selfhood that push the boundaries of womanhood and interact with cultural and political panoramas at national and international levels. Building an alternative history of Italian women and their creativity, Sambuco shows how the interplay of the senses and emotions becomes a profitable way to illuminate overlooked aspects of women’s subjectivity. Food and Emotions in Italian Women''s Writing ultimately reassesses women’s writing, giving value to the marginality of women’s bodies and positions through the conceptual domain of food.