Introduction

This book explores the philosophical implications of the popular adage that you are what you eat through twentieth-century literature. It investigates the connections between the alimentary and the ontological: between what or how one eats and what one is.

Focus and Subjects

Maria Christou's focus is on two influential modernist figures, Georges Bataille and Samuel Beckett; and two influential postmodernist figures, Paul Auster and Margaret Atwood. She aims to theorize the relationship between modernism and postmodernism from a specifically alimentary perspective.

Methodology and Themes

By examining the work of these major twentieth-century authors, this book focuses on strange or unusual acts of eating — eating otherwise — as a means to ways of being otherwise. What can eating tell us about being, about who we are and about our being in the world?

Conclusion

This powerful, innovative study takes literary food studies in a new direction.