First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

An examination of the importance of oral experience as reflected in literature and using psychoanalytic theory as forwarded by Freud, Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein, and Julia Kristeva. The meaning of oral experience is explored with reference to several texts, looking at the oral bond between mother and child in Proust and questions of disordered eating raised by aggressive orality found in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Throughout a case is made for the pervasive pleasures, dreads, desires and dramas of the mouth.