Description
Book SynopsisThe obese' female body has often been portrayed as the other' to the slender body. However, this process of othering', or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where excess' has increasingly come to be studied as a physical abnormality' or a signifier of a personality defect' in contemporary Western society. This book engages with the multifarious re-imaginings of the excessive' embodiment in contemporary women's writing, drawing specifically on the construction of this form of embodiment in the works of Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Claude Tardat, and Judith Moore, whose texts offer a distinct literary response to the rigidly homogeneous and limiting representations of fatness, while prompting heterogeneous approaches to reading the excessive' female embodiment.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Difference of the Different: Challenges to the Homogenisation of 'Fatness' in Contemporary Western Culture 1. 'A comic turn, turned serious': Reading the Female Embodiment in Romance, the Trickster and the Cyborg in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil 2. 'I still think it was poetic': The Poetics and Politics of Hyperbole in Sexing the Cherry 3. Mothers, Daughters and 'Excess' in Lady Oracle and Sweet Death Conclusion: 'I am sorry I am so fat': A Narrative of 'Excess' in Fat Girl: A True Story Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Internet Resources
