Cultures of the Abdomen Diet, Digestion, and Fat in the Modern World

by Forth, Christopher E.; Carden-Coyne, Ana

• ISBN13: 9781403965219
• ISBN10: 1403965218
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-01-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Christopher E. Forth is a Reader in History at the Australian National University.
Ana Carden-Coyne is a Lecturer in the Centre for the Cultural History of War at the University of Manchester.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	vii
Introduction ``The Belly and Beyond: Body, Self, and Culture in Ancient and Modern Times''	1	(12)
Ana Carden-Coyne
Christopher E. Forth
Part I Diet, Digestion, Excretion	13	(74)
``The Physiology of Hypochondria in Eighteenth-Century Britain''	15	(16)
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
``Corporeal Economies: Work and Waste in Nineteenth-Century Constructions of Alimentation''	31	(20)
Joyce L. Huff
``Kakao and Kaka: Chocolate and the Excretory Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Europe''	51	(20)
Alison Moore
``American Guts and Military Manhood''	71	(16)
Ana Carden-Coyne
Part II Culture and the Abdomen	87	(80)
``The Philosophe's Stomach: Hedonism, Hypochondria, and the Intellectual in Enlightenment France''	89	(16)
Anne C. Vila
``Coleridge's Dreaming Gut: Digestion, Genius, Hypochondria''	105	(22)
George Rousseau
``It's `Alimentary': Feuerbach and the Dietetics of Antisemitism''	127	(20)
Jay Geller
``Tolstoy's Body: Diet, Desire, and Denial''	147	(20)
Ronald L. LeBlanc
Part III Fat and Society	167	(92)
``Weight Loss in the Age of Reason''	169	(16)
Ken Albala
``Useless and Pernicious Matter: Corpulence in Eighteenth-Century England''	185	(20)
Lucia Dacome
``'The Belly of Paris': The Decline of the Fat Man in Fin-de-Siecle France''	205	(16)
Christopher E. Forth
``How Fat Detectives Think''	221	(18)
Sander L. Gilman
``Fat in America''	239	(20)
Peter N. Stearns
Index	259