Food Effects in Ahmad Mahmud s Hamsayeha

Food connects the literary world to the real world and its role cannot be ignored in literature. Although it is about two decades that food is deemed seriously in academic contexts, it enjoys a remarkable rank in interdisciplinary researches. Food criticism is a recent phenomenon in literary studies and it is important for literary scholars to know its critical strength. Ahmad Mahmud, one of the most prominent contemporary Iranian writers, employs food abundantly in his fiction. The present study is an attempt to show how food plays an important role on the identity formation of characters in Ahamad Mahmud’s Hamsayeha. Particularly, this study seeks to explore and explain how food affects the life of some local people in the south. Furthermore, the absence of food as well as its presence will be analyzed in Mahmud’s fiction. Finally, the research is a focus on the real aspects of food related issues, rather than on their symbolic or metaphoric significances. Food is a major element in Mahmud’s fiction which plays important roles in various dichotomies such as society and individual, and men and women.