Results by title

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 toexamine how eating disorders and drug addiction developed in the nineteenth century as entwined 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.

My Victorians is a hybrid in both form and content, part memoir/extended lyric essay but also a work of biography, photography, and cultural, literary, and art history. This is a travelogue of writer Robert Clark’s attempt to work through a sudden and inexplicable five-year-long obsession focused on Victorian novelists, artists, architecture, and critics. He wends his way through England and Scotland, meticulously tracking down the haunts of Charles Dickens, George Gissing, John Millais, the Bloomsbury Group, and others, and documenting everything in ghostly photographs as he goes.

As Clark delves deeper into the Victorian world, he wonders: What can its artists offer a twenty-first century writer by way of insight into his own life and work? His obsession with Victoriana bleeds into all aspects of his life, even the seemingly incongruous world of online dating. My Victorians is in the spirit of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage and Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch. This book considers what happens when heartbreak, eros, faith, and doubt drive us to take refuge in the past.