The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Toward a Constructionist Fat History

   • Elena Levy-Navarro

   Pages 1-33

3. A Time Before Fat? Gluttony in Piers Plowman

   • Elena Levy-Navarro

   Pages 35-44

4. Emergence of Fatness Defiant: Skelton at Court

   • Elena Levy-Navarro

   Pages 45-65

5. Lean and Mean: Shakespeare’s Criticism of Thin Privilege

   • Elena Levy-Navarro

   Pages 67-109

6. Boundless Fat in Middleton’s a Game at Chess

   • Elena Levy-Navarro

   Pages 111-146

7. Weigh Me as a Friend: Jonson’s Multiple Constructions of the Fat Body

   • Elena Levy-Navarro

   Pages 147-191

8. Back Matter

   Pages 193-238

   PDF

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'.

• chess
• criticism
• culture
• obesity
• William Shakespeare
• British and Irish Literature

'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.

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