James Vernon

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.” In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself. With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

This ambitious and provocative study provides a new narrative of nineteenth-century English political history. Based on extensive research the book draws on recent 'postmodern' critical theory to read a vast range of hitherto neglected oral, visual and printed sources, in an attempt to expand our conception of the politics of the period. Read in this way, nineteenth-century English politics resolved itself into a story about the struggle to define the nation's constitution, past, present and future. It suggests the existence of a popular strain of English libertarian politics, albeit one that was used in many different ways. However, the book is also about the erosion of the radical and democratic potential of both this libertarian tradition and the constitution. Ironically, the invention of England's liberal democratic constitution depended upon the demise of the democratic forms of popular politics which accompanied the ascendancy of print and organised mass party politics. Thus, despite the inclusion of many men within the constitution, politics became less (not more) democratic: a phenomenon which the author sees as pertinent for many struggling to live in, or to establish, liberal democratic constitutions in our own times.