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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 child’s body as a contested site in post-Blair U.K. and in Lord of the Flies; H. G. Wells; Wilkie Collins’s subversively performative Fosco; Ben Jonson; the voluptuous Lillian Russell; Shakespeare’s 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.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
  2. p. 1
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  1. Title Page, Copyright
  2. pp. 2-7
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-viii
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  1. Illustrations
  2. pp. ix-x
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  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. xi-xii
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  1. Introduction: Changing Conceptions of the Fat Body in Western History
  2. pp. 1-16
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  1. Section One • Foundations
  1. 1. Fat Is a Fictional Issue: The Novel and the Rise of Weight-Watching
  2. pp. 19-40
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  1. Section Two • Fat and Empire
  1. 2. “Kill the Pig!”: Lord of the Flies, “Piggy,” and Anti-Fat Discourse
  2. pp. 43-65
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  1. 3. “The Fattest Clubman in London”: H. G. Wells’s “The Truth about Pyecraft” and the Culture of Reducing in England at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
  2. pp. 66-88
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  1. 4. Fosco’s Fat Drag: Performing the Victorian Fat Man in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
  2. pp. 89-108
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  1. Section Three • Fat, Class, and Culture
  1. 5. “As Horace Fat” in a Thin Land: Ben Jonson’s Experience and Strategy
  2. pp. 111-128
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  1. 6. American Excess: Cultural Representations of Lillian Russell in Turn-of-the-Century America
  2. pp. 129-145
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  1. 7. Greedy Bastards: Fat Kids, Class War, and the Ideology of Classlessness
  2. pp. 146-172
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  1. Section Four • Fat and Normativity
  1. 8. Resisting Fatphobia in the Critical Tradition of Venus and Adonis
  2. pp. 175-191
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  1. 9. “It’s Not Over Till the Fat Lady Sings”: The Weight of the Opera Diva
  2. pp. 192-212
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  1. 10. Fat’s No Four-Letter Word: Fat Feminism and Identity Politics in the 1970s and 1980s
  2. pp. 213-244
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 245-248
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 249-254
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