Disorderly Eaters - CL.

This collection of 15 academic but accessible essays explores how a variety of authors, from ancient times to modernity, have portrayed aberrant modes of eating, offering intriguing new readings of many well-known texts. Paulo Medeiros sketches the range of eating disorders in literature, noting that eating provides a classic ground for conflicts between individuals and their parents and society. J. Ellen Gainor, analyzing the collection of children's stories called Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle , focuses on the unusual case of an apparent male victim of anorexia nervosa. Mervyn Nicholson, probing the ``power poetics of food,'' shows how men control food, while women produce it. Paula Marantz Cohen, looking at 19th-century novels, argues that the literary heroine of that era was a functional version of the anorexic of today, each reflecting the family dynamics of her time. For Elsa Nettels, the Puritan culture influencing novelists like William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton manifests itself in what Howells called ``New England indigestion.'' Furst is the author of Fictions of Romantic Irony; Graham wrote stet quotes ``Don Juan'' and Regency England. (Nov.)