Dedication to hunger1996

In this passionate merging of personal history and scholarship, Leslie Heywood reveals the "anorexic logic" central to Western high culture. This logic privileges mind over body, masculine over feminine, individual over collective, control over emotion, and a realm of transcendence over the haphazardness of daily life. As clinical studies of anorexia show, this is the very logic adopted by millions of young American women today, to devastating effect.

In literature this anorexic logic is embodied in high modernism, as Heywood shows in discussions of Kafka, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Conrad. In a compelling chapter on Jean Rhys, Heywood reveals an author struggling to develop a clean, spare, "anorexic" style in the midst of a shatteringly messy emotional life. As Heywood...