Excess and Embodiment in Contemporary Women's Writing

· Studies in English Literatures Book 17 · Columbia University Press
Ebook
212
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

The '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.
The '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 de...

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About the author

Zeynep Z. Atayurt received her MA and PhD degrees in English at the University of Leeds, UK. She is currently working in the Department of English Language and Literature at Ankara University in Turkey. Her research interests include literary and visual representations of forms of embodiment in contemporary Anglo-American culture and literature.

Zeynep Z. Atayurt received her MA and PhD degrees in English at the University of Leeds, UK. She is currently working in the Department of English Language and Literature at Ankara University in Turkey. Her research interests include literary and visual representations of forms of embodiment in c...

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