Spaces of Food Consumption in Children’s and YA Literature

Dear Colleagues,

Food and eating occupy a central place in many children’s stories, and the extent of scholarly interest in the topic is evident in numerous critical works, ranging from the monograph Voracious Children (2006) to collections such as Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature (2009), Feast or Famine? Food and Children’s Literature (2015), Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature (2020), and Eating Cultures in Children’s Literature (2024). Discussions of food in children’s narratives also feature prominently in food studies collections like The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food (2018) and Food and Literature (2018), as well as in a wealth of journal essays and edited volumes too numerous to list. Across all these works, scholars explore the wide range of meanings and interpretations that food holds within children’s literature. While fictional food itself has been discussed from a variety of different perspectives, the significance of the spaces in which food is prepared and consumed has not been given the same critical attention. It is safe to say that in children’s literature there are as many inns, cafés, restaurants, dining rooms, canteens, picnics, chocolate factories and tea parties—indoor and outdoor venues alike—as there are types of real and fantasy foods. Some of these places, such as the ‘Osteria del Gambero Rosso’ where Pinocchio dines with the Fox and the Cat, have entered the popular imagination and have become cultural references in gastronomy. Other venues disrupt the boundaries between inside/outside and between kinds of eating practices: although supplied with a large armchair and a long table fully set for tea, Alice’s ‘Mad Tea-Party’ takes place, like a picnic, under a tree. On other occasions, it is the boundaries between space and food which are torn down.

This Special Issue brings together food studies and children’s literature scholarship to examine acts of consumption in relation to space and place, and to explore how practices of eating in children’s and young adult literature shape identity, memory, control, ethics, and embodiment across diverse genres, media, and cultural contexts. Taken together, the essays in this Special Issue will demonstrate how spatialised acts of consumption shape narrative meaning and cultural discourse in children’s and YA literature, offering interdisciplinary insights relevant to literary studies, education, and pedagogy.

References

Daniel, Carolyn. Voracious children: Who eats whom in children's literature. Routledge, 2006.

Keeling, Kara K., and Scott T. Pollard, eds. Critical approaches to food in children’s literature. Routledge, 2012.

Carrington, Bridget, ed. Feast or Famine? Food and Children’s Literature. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.

Keeling, Kara K., and Scott T. Pollard. Table lands: food in children's literature. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2020.

Gasperini, Anna, Björn Sundmark, and Laura Tosi. Eating Cultures in Children’s Literature: National, International and Transnational Perspectives. Malmö University Press, 2024.

Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, and Donna Lee Brien, eds. The Routledge companion to literature and food. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Shahani GG. Introduction: Writing on Food and Literature. In: Shahani GG, ed. Food and Literature. Cambridge Critical Concepts. Cambridge University Press; 2018:1-36.

Dr. Alessandro Cabiati
Prof. Dr. Laura Tosi
Dr. Rachele Bassan
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• food
• consumption
• space
• place
• children’s literature
• young adult
• fairy tale