This study explores the subtle and complex significance of food and eating in the fiction of contemporary women writers. Sarah Sceats' lively analysis demonstrates that food and its consumption are not simply fundamental to life but are inseparable from questions of gender, power and control. Focusing on the work of Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis, she makes powerful connections between food and love, motherhood, sexual desire, self identity and social behavior, and engages with issues as diverse as cannibalism and eating disorders.

"Image and Power" is an important work of literary and cultural criticism. This collection of essays focuses on some of the major issues addressed by women's writing in the twentieth century, concerning genre, subjectivity and social and cultural expectations, issues which in the past have been regarded from an essentially male perspective. The text introduces women writers whose novels have been widely read and provides an important contribution to the debate about women in literature.

Image and Power is an important work of literary and cultural criticism. This collection of essays focuses on some of the major issues addressed by women's writing in the twentieth century, concerning genre, subjectivity and social and cultural expectations, issues which in the past have been regarded from an essentially male perspective. The text introduces women writers whose novels have been widely read and provides an important contribution to the debate about women in literature.

This study explores the subtle and complex significance of food and eating in contemporary women's fiction. Sarah Sceats reveals how preoccupations with food, its consumption and the body are central to the work of writers such as Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Michele Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis. Through close analysis of their fiction, Sceats examines the multiple metaphors associated with these themes, making powerful connections between food and love, motherhood, sexual desire, self identity and social behaviour. The activities surrounding food and its consumption (or non-consumption) embrace both the most intimate and the most thoroughly public aspects of our lives. The book draws on psychoanalytical, feminist and sociological theory to engage with a diverse range of issues, including chapters on cannibalism and eating disorders. This lively study demonstrates that feeding and eating are not simply fundamental to life but are inseparable from questions of gender, power and control.