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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.

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Zeynep Z. Atayurt received her MA and PhD degrees in English at the University of Leeds, UK. She is currently working in the Department of English Language and Literature at Ankara University in Turkey. Her research interests include literary and visual representations of forms of embodiment in contemporary Anglo-American culture and literature.

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