Meat and the Medicalization of Diet in Modernist Fiction

Alternately deemed a miracle cure for a variety of diseases and denigrated as a health hazard, meat consumption was medicalized in the early twentieth century. This project investigates fiction writers' responses to this phenomenon, exploring meat and mysticism in Forster and Huxley; Richardson's dietary writings; meat as tuberculosis treatment in Mansfield and Lawrence; the force-feeding of suffrage activitsts and psychiatric patients, via Woolf; and Joyce's medical training to understand meat in Ulysses (1922). Tracing dominant medical and pseudo-medical discourses on meat-eating, I argue that carnivory shifts our attention to literary interests in ingestion, and the relationship between bodies and texts.