The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity - by E Levy-Navarro (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This book offers the first sustained examination of fatness in the early modern period. Using readings of such major figures as Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton, this book considers alternative ways that fat was constructed before the introduction of the modern pathologized category of 'obesity'.

Review Quotes

'The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity challenges the historically constructed discourse of fatness and obesity as moral transgression. Levy-Navarro offers fat embodiment as a revisionist-and indeed, populist-oppositional strategy against ceding the dominant will to the nationalist 'lean and mean, ' with its assertion of aesthetic and moral superiority.' - Olga L. Valbuena, Associate Professor of English, Wake Forest University

'Elena Levy-Navrro's history of size complements existing histories of gender, race, age and class.' - Katharine Craik, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Elena Levy-Navarro is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater.