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 maneuvers 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. In penetrating examinations of Kafka, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Conrad, Heywood demonstrates how the anorexic aesthetic is embodied in high modernism. In a compelling chapter on Jean Rhys, Heywood portrays an author who struggles to develop a clean, spare, "anorexic" style in the midst of a shatteringly messy emotional life. As Heywood points out, students are trained in the aesthetic of high modernism, and academics are pressured into its straitjacket. The resulting complications are reflected in structures as diverse as gender identity formation, sexual harassment, and eating disorders. Direct, engaging, and intensely informed by the author's personal involvement with her subject, Dedication to Hunger offers a powerful challenge to cultural assumptions about language, gender, subjectivity, and identity. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

"Leslie Heywood weaves deftly and powerfully between contemporary cultural analysis, literary criticism, and her own experiences as a postmodern/female body. The result is a work that is both critically acute and vibrating with emotional energy and insight, a work that itself constitutes a promise of new life in the 'anorexic' culture she so sharply diagnoses and interprets."--Susan Bordo, author of Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body "Though Dedication to Hunger is a brilliant book of literary criticism, it is also far more than that. It is a challenging work that should be widely read by all those interested in the underlying assumptions that define our culture."--J. Hillis Miller, author of The Ethics of Reading

Writing this book was harder than I thought and more rewarding than I could have ever imagined. I enjoyed every single moment of writing this book. None of this would have been possible without the support of my parents, my family. They stood by me during every struggle and all my successes. Many more people have helped me to complete this book. I am grateful and thankful to all of them. Everything, everyone, every passing moment, has helped me to complete this book. I dedicate this book to everyone who wants to read it. This book is a small effort from me to put an end to all of your suffering. I hope you are happy, and will remain happy forever. I hope you are not sad, not depressed, not lonely, not angry, and not scared of anything. I hope you are free from all kinds of suffering. I hope you are living your life in freedom. In this book, you should ignore all the spelling mistakes, and grammatical errors, and understand what I want to say. “Only that, who begs, suffers.” – English Kshitij

Glck's poetry resists collection. With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems.

Focusing on three hunger strikes occurring on university campuses in California in the 1990s, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval examines people's willingness to make the extreme sacrifice and give their lives in order to create a more just society.