The essays in this issue trace various complexities and cultural symbolisms of hunger, appetite, and desire from the early twentieth-century modernist avant-gardes to postmodern texts and performance art.

In their scope, they also speak to a centuries-old interest in (human) appetite: be it in its literal and figurative form, or its socio-cultural, political, and popular reverberations.

Franz Kafka’s 1922 short story, “The Hunger Artist,” inspires the theme of this collection and perhaps best delineates the intricate dialectic of needing to exceed the limits of convention while simultaneously framing, curbing, honing in the desire to expand beyond such limits.