This book explores the various manifestations of eating disorders in literature, including cannibalism, magical food attributes, religiously motivated fasting, and eating problems of children, from the classical period to Tony Morrison, in American, British and European texts. A common theme is the role of eating options as a means of self-empowerment. The texts discussed in the genre are different (narrative, drama, epic, lyric, and self-memoirs), but they reveal, everywhere, the individual's longing for independence of some kind. In many socially constrained cases, eating patterns are the only option available, especially for women.

Unregulated eating thus becomes a tool of self-assertion as an insurgency against an unacceptable dominant spirit. Intentional eating reveals that the creative writers were, through absolute observation, aware of the dynamics of eating disorders long before the medical community recognized and institutionalized syndromes in the 19th century.

The literary images analyzed here can serve as luminous models for participants in the treatment of eating disorders and those suffering from them.

I want that book.