The fat rich and the thin rich

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Jul 30 22:50:42 PDT 2002


At 11:22 AM -0700 7/30/02, joanna bujes wrote:
>The reason for the image change comes out of Veblen I guess. Now
>that the poor/working class are sedentary, overworked, and
>overweight, being thin and in good shape is a major signal that you
>are not working class. A hundred years ago, when the poor were on
>this side of starvation, it was cool for the rich to be fat.

***** Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body

Anna Krugovoy Silver

£40.00

August 2002 | Hardback | 234 pages 2 half-tones | ISBN: 0521816025

In stock

Anna Krugovoy Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British writers used physical states of the female body - hunger, appetite, fat and slenderness - in the creation of female characters. Silver argues that anorexia nervosa, first diagnosed in 1873, serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. In addition, Silver relates these literary expressions to the representation of women's bodies in the conduct books, beauty manuals and other non-fiction prose of the period, contending that women 'performed' their gender and class alliances through the slender body. Silver discusses a wide range of writers including Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll to show that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviours of the anorexic girl or woman.

<http://books.cambridge.org/0521816025.htm> ***** -- Yoshie

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