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...

This volume combines narratological analyses with an investigation of the ideological ramifications of the use of narrative strategies. The collected essays do not posit any intrinsic or stable connection between narrative techniques and world views. Rather, they demonstrate that world views are inevitably expressed through highly specific formal strategies. This insight leads the contributors to investigate why and how particular narrative techniques are employed and under what conditions.