ENG 381: Women's Food Literature

Welcome, English 381 students. This guide will provide you with Library resources that support your course Delicious Reading: Women's Food Literature and your research essay. From the menus, you'll find sample searches; topical books and ebooks; links to scholarly journal articles; instructions on how to search for articles; and more. 

This course will examine the intersection of women’s studies and food studies as it develops across different genres of literature. Food is an incredibly broad topic and can go in many directions, but this course will tend to prioritize the activities of cooking (both amateur and professional) as well as eating as ways of understanding characters in both nonfiction and fiction texts told from different female narrators and/or authors. Learning the eating habits of a literary character enables readers to approach a text in a nuanced way. Food will always be a defining theme within every text on the syllabus, but there will be an intentional range of ways in which food/what types of food is represented across the texts and for different purposes, etc. In addition to this class realizing the varied significance of food in literature and film as the semester progresses, we will interrogate the different (and sometimes competing) depictions of cooking, eating, savoring, and craving as these often speak to larger concerns of identity, interpersonal relationships, sense of community, understanding of location, and appreciation of a culture. All of our authors are American; not all of our texts take place in the United States. Roles within the food industry, eating practices, and food deserts also serve as beneficial gateway topics to reach into more challenging areas of conversation such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion and social class. And are American readers still “obsessed” with food? And if so, why is that? And where do women factor into the role of food in literature? Food studies has become a growing critical interdisciplinary field, so I want this class to gain that foundation—especially as it intersects with literary studies—and develop confidence in applying the lens of food to interpret a text in a critical way.

McGunigal, L. (2025) ENG 381: Delicious Reading: Women's Food Literature [Syllabus] Missouri Southern State University