Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture

Writing as a competitive athlete, an academic, and a woman, Leslie Heywood merges personal history and scholarship to expose the anorexic logic that underlies Western high culture. She manoeuvers deftly across the terrain of modern literature, illustrating how this logic - the privileging of mind over body, of hard over soft, of masculine over feminine - is at the heart of the modernist style. Her argument ranges from Plato to women's bodybuilding, from Franz Kafka to Nike ads.