French Literature Reviews - 2026

Writing Size Zero. Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures
Comparative and World Literature

Isabelle MEURET, Writing Size Zero. Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures, Bern / Berlin / Bruxelles / Frankfurt am Main / New York / Wien, Peter Lang (Comparatisme et Société / Comparatism and Society), 2007, 294 p.
ISBN978-90-5201-282-7

ABSTRACT

Much like hysteria, anorexia is a fin-de-siècle pathology that continues to fascinate and reached epidemic proportions at the turn of the millennium. Alongside the spread of this phenomenon, a substantial body of experiential literature has emerged, documenting its presence across diverse regions of the globe. While medical discourse still grapples with this complex puzzle, literature opens up alternative avenues of interpretation by revealing the deep interconnection between writing and starvation. Both signifying practices represent experiences at the very limits of endurance, where the flows of physical elements—such as food and words—engage in a constant dialogue. Challenging conventional contemporary interpretations of anorexia, this book offers a fresh perspective on the creative impulse inherent in the condition, which the author defines as "Writing Size Zero." The body of writing and the writing of the body, as manifested in both Western and post-colonial texts, carve out an intermediary space that gives rise to new epistemologies. Through a meticulous close reading of the semiotics of self-starvation, the author dismantles the myth of anorexia as a uniquely Western mental illness, emphasizing the wide array of expressions and literary figurations associated with the disorder. By ascribing meaning to self-starvation, the act of writing endows anorexia with an ethical dimension.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Figurations vs. representations of anorexia
Anorexia in contemporary world literatures
Starving and writing
Anorexia in western and post-colonial texts
Creative process and pathologisation
The birth of the author and the ethics of anorexia
Subjective experience of anorexia in experiential texts

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isabelle Meuret, Ph.D. (Catholic University of Louvain). She teaches English at the Free University of Brussels and conducts research in English-language literatures and cultural studies.

The intersection of bodily affliction and creative expression has long occupied scholars examining how physical extremities find articulation in modern literature. Within literary and cultural studies, the representation of eating disorders often intersects with broader discussions concerning identity, self-definition, and the limits of representation. By focusing on experiential texts that document these conditions, researchers investigate how narrative forms adapt to convey experiences that frequently resist conventional modes of language. This approach places such texts within a wider tradition of writing that interrogates the boundaries between physical states and textual creation.

Isabelle Meuret examines the presence of anorexia across diverse literary traditions, contrasting Western and post-colonial texts to explore the semiotics of self-starvation. The volume addresses experiential writing and the creative impulse associated with the condition, engaging with questions of pathologisation and the subjective experience of illness. Readers interested in contemporary world literatures, cultural studies, and the relationship between physical phenomena and literary expression may find it relevant to their inquiries into how modern texts figure complex human conditions.