Reading Eating Disorders uses literary texts as a key to open the door of American culture. Novels and poems on disordered eating reveal America's bulimic relationship to food and the tendency to punish individuals—particularly women and the poor—for not being slender. These texts partake of the confessional ethos in American public culture—the need to testify to and hear about intimate physical details. Tracing the history of eating disorders and Western culture’s idealization of thinness with reference to canonical literary works such as Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1859) and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-8), I illustrate anorexia, bulimia, and the binge-eating disorder using contemporary accounts of these disorders. A cultural studies approach to literature is taken to describe how writings on eating disorders reveal the political and economic world out of which they are written.
Greta Olson - Professor of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies - University of Giessen
BA Vassar College / University College London (Philosophy / Studio Art)
MA, PhD, and Habilitation University of Freiburg (English / American Studies / Philosophy)