ABOUT THIS BOOK

Traces the comorbidity of eating disorders and drug addiction in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, as a product of and contributor to colonial expansion.

Morbid Cravings is the first book to examine how eating disorders and drug addiction developed in the nineteenth century as comorbid, psychosocial responses to imperial-driven cultural demands that Britons regulate their appetites. Through close readings of Jane Austen, Thomas De Quincey, Sydney Whiting, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Hannah Markley explores the comorbidity of these disorders in relation to imperial trade and colonial conquest, applying a postcolonial lens to show us how emerging, separate diagnostic categories were in fact structured by the same social and economic systems.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the influx of sugar, tea, coffee, opium, chocolate, and tobacco began to transform British diets and nervous systems, creating dependence on not only these substances but on the colonial systems that delivered them. In turn, medicine attempted to curtail these appetites by promoting restrictive dietary practices. By focusing on how anorexia nervosa, opium-eating, dyspepsia, and compulsive injection emerged in relation to attempts to regulate British appetites for colonial substances, Markley argues that the medico-ideological imperative to restrict appetites produced interrelated representations of eating disorders and addictions that ultimately enacted the voracious logic of British racial capitalism.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Hannah Markley is an Assistant Professor at Stetson University, where they also serve as Director of the Medical and Health Humanities. Their work explores topics in the literary history and theory of appetite and addiction as well as the politics of breathing and disease in the long nineteenth century.

REVIEWS

“Morbid Cravings is powerful and compelling. Markley interweaves medical, imperial, and literary discourses with meticulous care, exploring how the British impulse to devour colonized regions—and to chasten this impulse—translated into disorders of appetite over the nineteenth century. A complex, masterful contribution.” —David Collings, author of Disastrous Subjectivities: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Real

“Markley makes the insightful and searing argument that colonial expansionism—the glutting of the colonial state—produces anorectic symptoms in the women left at home. Fresh and dynamic, Morbid Cravings will be valuable to scholars ranging from Victorian studies to new materialism and food studies.” —Kate Thomas, author of Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters

“Morbid Cravings not only contributes to ongoing academic narratives that expose colonial destruction in the Romantic and Victorian periods, but Markley’s use of period medical theory, moral philosophy, and postcolonial theory may also reframe contemporary understandings of substance abuse and eating disorders.” —Laura R. Kremmel, author of Gothic Dementia: Troubled Minds in Gothic Timelines

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
List of Illustrations

Introduction Pathologies of Self-Control
Chapter 1 Happy Appetites: Anorectic Restrictions and Colonial Expansions in Jane Austen
Chapter 2 Compulsive Sobriety: Thomas De Quincey and the Stomachache of Empire
Chapter 3 Dyspeptic Eruptions and Imperial Disgust: The Pursuit of Health in Memoirs of a Stomach
Chapter 4 An Appetite for Injection: The Mystery of Addiction in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four
Conclusion The Disorder of Appetite

Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index