The creative anorexia

Some months ago we presented the paperback edition of Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body, and now we found a newly published book about the same topic, this time in France.

L'anorexie créatice (The creative anorexia) is written by Isabelle Meuret and is published by Klincksieck in the collection 50 questions. The Brontë sister studied in each book has changed. In the first one it was Charlotte and her novels, especially Shirley and Villette, that were the object of the study. But now it seems that Emily is the one studied (look at the 50 questions list).

An end-of-the-century pathology with all the hysteria that goes with it, anorexia fascinates and reaches epidemic proportions. However, exaggerated fasting has always existed, as biblical tales show or contemporary sources testify to. Affirmation of a negation, absurd research of an absolute, or an interior experience of void, anorexia is the prey of all the speeches and becomes mythology. The emaciated body becomes the dead metaphor. In that place where medical arguments become exhausted, literature offers new interpretations through creations proposed by the authors.
Anorexia and writing are two experiences on the edge. Driving force, remedy or consequence of anorexia, writing is closely dependent on it. The two concepts are so curiously entwined that anorexia seems a writing pathology. This tour through literature, from the fasting champions to the hunger artists, from Kafka to Gide, through Byron, Brontë, or Woolf, makes it possible to define a semiotics of anorexia or what it is called here: the writing size zero.
Translation (or whatever this is) by BrontëBlog. Be nice.

Categories: Books, Scholar, Emily_Brontë