Feast, Fast, Survive: The Poetics of Food and Life

2025-12-05
Erothanatos Volume 10 Issue 2 CFP logo

Food is one of the most fundamental coordinates of human existence. It nurtures bodies, shapes cultures, anchors rituals, and sustains the rhythms of daily life. Yet its absence—whether enforced, self-chosen, or imposed—opens a complex field of meanings tied to suffering, resistance, sanctity, identity, and mortality. From the ascetic fasts of saints to the hunger strikes of political prisoners, from famine narratives to mythic depictions of divine hunger, from the symbolic politics of eating to the philosophical implications of starvation, the relationship between food and life, including the intervals of non-eating, reveals profound tensions between survival and transcendence, selfhood and society, eros and thanatos.

For Volume 10, Issue 2, Erothanatos invites original research articles, theoretical interventions, and creative-critical essays that engage with the theme of Food and Life vis-à-vis Fasting, Starvation, and Death. This special issue seeks to explore how literary, cultural, philosophical, and artistic traditions conceptualize nourishment and deprivation, framing them as sites of meaning, conflict, and transformation.

 

Suggested Areas (but not limited to):

  • Representations of hunger, famine, and starvation in world literature

  • Food as metaphor, symbol, or ritual in literary and cultural texts

  • Fasting as spiritual practice, political strategy, or aesthetic gesture

  • The phenomenology of hunger: philosophical, psychological, or anthropological approaches

  • Food scarcity, poverty, and biopolitics in contemporary or historical contexts

  • Culinary memory, identity, and belonging

  • Mythological and religious narratives involving hunger, feeding, sacrifice, or abstention

  • Ethics of consumption and the politics of the body

  • Food, death, and mourning rituals

  • Environmental crises, food insecurity, and ecological humanities

  • Eating, desire, and the dialectics of eros/thanatos

 

Submission Guidelines:

  • Word Limit: 3000–6000 words.

  • Format: MLA 9th Edition.

  • Originality: Submissions must be original, unpublished, and not under review elsewhere.

  • File Type: MS Word (.doc/.docx).

  • Submitted file (.doc/.docx) should not disclose the identity of the author in any way.

 

Submission Link: Submission Portal  

 

Article Processing Fee: 1200INR or 14USD or 12 Euro

 

Submission Deadline: February 10, 2026


Publication Date: April 2026

 

Peer Review:

All submissions will undergo rigorous double-blind peer review.

 

We welcome contributions from scholars, independent researchers, and practitioners across literature, cultural studies, philosophy, religious studies, performance studies, anthropology, and allied humanities disciplines.