Excess and Embodiment in Contemporary Women&39s Writing [Paperback]

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.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.Acknowledgements
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
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