Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture

Leslie Heywood's book "Dedication to Hunger" challenges cultural assumptions about language, gender, subjectivity, and identity by merging personal history and scholarship. She demonstrates how the anorexic aesthetic is embodied in high modernism, leading to complications such as gender identity formation, sexual harassment, and eating disorders. The book is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact.

Format: Hardback
Length: 260 pages
Publication date: 25 March 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

Leslie Heywood, a competitive athlete, academic, and woman, seamlessly blends personal history and scholarship to unveil the anorexic logic that underpins Western high culture. Through her deft navigation of modern literature, she illustrates how this logic, which prioritizes the mind over the body, the hard over the soft, and the masculine over the feminine, forms the very essence of the modernist style. Her argument spans from Plato to women's bodybuilding, from Franz Kafka to Nike ads.

In her penetrating analyses of Kafka, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Conrad, Heywood showcases how the anorexic aesthetic manifests itself in high modernism. In a captivating chapter on Jean Rhys, Heywood portrays an author who grapples with creating a clean, spare, anorexic style amidst a tumultuous emotional life. As Heywood highlights, students are indoctrinated into the aesthetic of high modernism, and academics are pressured to conform to its strict constraints. The resulting complications manifest in various structures, including gender identity formation, sexual harassment, and eating disorders.

Dedication to Hunger, written with a direct, engaging, and deeply informed perspective by the author's personal involvement with her subject, presents a formidable challenge to cultural assumptions about language, gender, subjectivity, and identity. This title is part of UC Press' Voices Revived program, which commemorates the University of California Press' commitment to seek out and nurture the brightest minds and provide them with a platform to express their ideas, reach a wider audience, and have a significant impact. Voices Revived leverages print-on-demand technology to make high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again, drawing from a backlist dating back to 1893. Originally published in 1996, this title has been revitalized and reintroduced to readers.

Weight: 544g
Dimension: 234 x 156 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520357075