The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, And Imprisonment by Maud Ellmann

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The phenomenon of voluntary self-starvation - whether by political hunger strikers or lone anorectics - is a puzzle of engrossing power, suggesting a message more radical than any uttered aloud. In this fascinating phenomenology, Maud Ellmann teases out this message, its genesis, expression, and significance. How, she asks, has the act of eating become the metaphor for compliance, starvation the metaphor for protest? How does the rejection of food become the rejection of intolerable social constraints - or of actual imprisonment? What is achieved at the extremity of such a protest - at the moment of death? Ellmann brilliantly unravels the answers; they lie, she shows, in the inverse relationship between bodily hunger and verbal expression. Drawing her examples from Yeats and Kafka, Marx and Freud, Wole Soyinka and the suffragettes, Mahatma Ghandi and Jane Fonda, she explores the entangled meanings of writing and hunger in our culture of starvers. This 1993 Harvard University Press Hardback is in very good condition. DJ. DJ frayed along the top. ISBN: 9780674427051 SKU: 1582732 This image is of the actual book. Show more