HISTORICIZING FAT IN ANGLO-AMERICAN CULTURE IBD

Sinopse

Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture, edited by Elena Levy-Navarro, is the first collection of essays to offer a historical consideration of fat bodies in Anglophone culture. The interdisciplinary essays cover periods from the medieval to the contemporary, mapping out a new terrain for historical consideration. These essays question many of the commonplace assumptions that circulate around the category of fat: that fat exists as a natural and transhistorical category, that a premodern period existed which universally celebrated fat and knew no fatphobia, and that the thin, youthful body, as the presumptively beautiful and healthy one, should be the norm by which to judge other bodies. The essays begin with a consideration of the interrelationship between the rise of weight-watching and the rise of the novel. The essays that follow consider such wide-ranging figures as the fat childâÇÖs body as a contested site in post-Blair U.K. and in Lord of the Flies, H. G. Wells, Wilkie CollinsâÇÖs subversively performative Fosco, Ben Jonson, the voluptuous Lillian Russell, ShakespeareâÇÖs Venus and Adonis, the opera diva, and the fat feminist activists of recent San Francisco. In developing their histories in a self-conscious way that addresses the pervasive fatphobia of the present-day Anglophone culture, Historicizing Fat suggests ways in which scholarship and criticism in the humanities can address, resist, and counteract the assumptions of late modern culture. á