Cultures of the Abdomen

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.

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