Fat Characters in Contemporary Literature

In her essay on Salon.com Contemporary Literature’s Obesity Epidemic, Hannah Rosefield of the LA Review of Books examines “fat characters” in modern literature beginning with this: “…there aren’t nearly as many fat characters in modern fiction as you’d expect, considering how many fat people there are in the world today.” Rosefield draws upon Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill” (1926) to set the analysis of Big Ray by Kimball, Heft by Liz Moore, The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg, and Erin Lange’s young adult novel Butter, each of which “have protagonists who are double or even triple their ‘healthy’ weight.”