ABSTRACT
Recent examinations of the culture of consumption in different periods of literary history have interrogated the connections between incorporation and introjection while redefining orality as the space where speech and food meet and interact. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book has affinities with some of Ellmann's attempts to delineate a general poetics of hunger that serves to raise questions about authority and political representation. By looking at the different acts of visceral, affective and ideological resistance performed by the starving body, the authors hope to open further avenues of research into areas which exceed the dominant paradigms of food and hunger studies, whether of the aesthetic or the cultural/sociological variety. Dealing with hunger and starvation as a cultural phenomenon calls for a maximalist method that uses themes, ideas and tropes as the structuring, transversal blocks.
