The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton [Hardcover]

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'.Towards a Constructionist Fat History A Time before Fat?: Gluttony in Piers Plowman Emergence of Fatness Defiant: Skelton at Court Lean and Mean: Shakespeare's Criticism of Thin Privilege Boundless Fat in Middleton's A Game at Chess Weigh Me as a Friend:? Jonson's Multiple Constructions of the Fat

'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

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