Excess and Embodiment in Contemporary Women's Writing

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.