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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 Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Difference of the Different: Challenges to the Homogenisation of 'Fatness' in Contemporary Western Culture -- 1 'A comic turn, turned serious': Reading the Female Embodiment in Romance, the Trickster and the Cyborg in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil -- 2 'I still think it was poetic': The Poetics and Politics of Hyperbole in Sexing the Cherry -- 3 Mothers, Daughters and Excess in Lady Oracle and Sweet Death -- 3.1 'The outline of my former body still surrounded me like a mist': Traumatic Resonances of 'Excess' in Lady Oracle -- 3.1.1 'Obesity', Trauma, and its Manifestations within the Mother-Daughter Dyad -- 3.1.2 From 'Fat' to 'Thin': Reversals, Reconciliations, and Confrontations -- 3.2 'I know what I look like. It's all planned, calculated, willed': The Revenge Narrative of 'Excess' in Sweet Death -- 3.2.1 Accessing the Private through Writing of 'Excess' -- 3.2.2 Tensions in the Mother-Daughter Dyad and Desire for Power -- Conclusion -- 'I am sorry I am so fat': A Narrative of 'Excess' in Fat Girl: A True Story -- Bibliography -- Primary Sources -- Secondary Sources -- Internet Resources
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