We live in a world obsessed with abdomens. Whether we call it the belly, tummy, or stomach, we take this area of the body for granted as an object of our gaze, the subject of our obsessions, and the location of deeply felt desires. Diet, nutrition, and exercise all play critical roles in the development of our body images and thus our sense of self, not least because how we are made to feel about bodies (both our own and those of others) is often grounded in dietary and lifestyle choices. Cultures of the Abdomen traces the history of social, cultural, and medical ideas about the stomach and related organs since the seventeenth century, and demonstrates that a focused study of the abdomen is necessary for understanding the deep historical meanings that underscore our contemporary obsessions with hunger, diet, fat, indigestion, and excretion. It locates that history from dietary ideals in early modern Europe to the vexing issue of American fat in the twenty-first century, surveying along the way developments in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia.
Part One: Diet, Digestion, Excretion
The Physiology of Hypochondria in Eighteenth-Century Britain;F.A.Jonsson
Corporeal Economies: Work and Waste in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Alimentation;J.Huff
Kakao and Kaka: Chocolate and the Excretory Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Europe;A.Moore
American Guts and Military Manhood;A.Carden-Coyne
Part Two: Culture and the Abdomen
The Philosophe's Stomach: Hedonism, Hypochondria, and the Intellectual in Enlightenment France;A.C. Vila
Coleridge's Dreaming Gut: Digestion, Genius, Hypochondria;G.Rousseau
It's Alimentary: Feuerbach, Jewish "Brotstudium" and the Dietetics of Antisemitism;J.Geller
Tolstoy's Body: Diet, Desire, and Denial;R.LeBlanc
Part Three: Fat and Society * Weight Loss in the Age of Reason;K.Albala
Useless and Pernicious Matter: Representing Corpulence in Eighteenth-Century Britain;L.Dacome
"The Belly of Paris": The Decline of the Fat Man in Fin-de-Siècle France;C.E. Forth
How Fat Detectives Think;S.Gilman
Fat in America; P.N. Stearns
CHRISTOPHER E. FORTH is a Reader in History at the Australian National University.
ANA CARDEN-COYLE is a Lecturer in the Centre for the Cultural History of War at the University of Manchester, UK.
Description
We live in a world obsessed with abdomens. Whether we call it the belly, tummy, or stomach, we take this area of the body for granted as an object of our gaze, the subject of our obsessions, and the location of deeply felt desires. Diet, nutrition, and exercise all play critical roles in the development of our body images and thus our sense of self, not least because how we are made to feel about bodies (both our own and those of others) is often grounded in dietary and lifestyle choices. Cultures of the Abdomen traces the history of social, cultural, and medical ideas about the stomach and related organs since the seventeenth century, and demonstrates that a focused study of the abdomen is necessary for understanding the deep historical meanings that underscore our contemporary obsessions with hunger, diet, fat, indigestion, and excretion. It locates that history from dietary ideals in early modern Europe to the vexing issue of American fat in the twenty-first century, surveying along the way developments in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia.
Contents
Part One: Diet, Digestion, Excretion
The Physiology of Hypochondria in Eighteenth-Century Britain;F.A.Jonsson
Corporeal Economies: Work and Waste in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Alimentation;J.Huff
Kakao and Kaka: Chocolate and the Excretory Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Europe;A.Moore
American Guts and Military Manhood;A.Carden-Coyne
Part Two: Culture and the Abdomen
The Philosophe's Stomach: Hedonism, Hypochondria, and the Intellectual in Enlightenment France;A.C. Vila
Coleridge's Dreaming Gut: Digestion, Genius, Hypochondria;G.Rousseau
It's Alimentary: Feuerbach, Jewish "Brotstudium" and the Dietetics of Antisemitism;J.Geller
Tolstoy's Body: Diet, Desire, and Denial;R.LeBlanc
Part Three: Fat and Society * Weight Loss in the Age of Reason;K.Albala
Useless and Pernicious Matter: Representing Corpulence in Eighteenth-Century Britain;L.Dacome
"The Belly of Paris": The Decline of the Fat Man in Fin-de-Siècle France;C.E. Forth
How Fat Detectives Think;S.Gilman
Fat in America; P.N. Stearns
Authors
CHRISTOPHER E. FORTH is a Reader in History at the Australian National University.
ANA CARDEN-COYLE is a Lecturer in the Centre for the Cultural History of War at the University of Manchester, UK.
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