First Published in 2000. This study stands alone in pairing black and white American women writers across the twentieth century on the intertwined issues of female beauty and literary aesthetics. Other studies published during the late 1980s and early 1990s—such as Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (1988), Dana B. Nelson’s The Word in Black and White: Reading "Race" in American Literature, 1638-1867 (1992), Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993), and Laura Doyle’s Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (1994)—have also engaged in the process of reading racialist discourse in white texts or in attempting to construct a dialogue between black and white texts. None, however, has been concerned with female beauty and literary aesthetics in relation to twentieth-century American women writers and race.

This study argues that twentieth-century American women writers' textual representations of female beauty generally recognize a link between beauty standards and aesthetic ideology, exploring female beauty as a symptom of prevailing ideas about art and esthetics. Female beauty, in their texts, is not merely an issue of whether a female character is pretty or not; it is an expression of the controlling discourses negotiated by character, text, and author. In this study, therefore, the women writers' texts are read after interchapters outlining their key cultural and literary contexts. Revising Paul de Man's method of exploring scenes of reading, this study focuses on scenes of beauty in which a character, narrator, or speaker negotiates ideas about beauty. The author pairs Euro-American and African American women writers across the century in three generations: H.D. and Zora Neale Hurston; Gwendolyn Brooks and Sylvia Plath; and Toni Morrison and Louis Gluck. As such, this study offers a landmark black/white dialogue on female beauty in twentieth-century American culture and literature. Scenes of beauty in the texts of these writers suggest multiple feminine aesthetics in twentieth-century American writing, unified in their negotiation of the aesthetic ideologies embodied in female beauty.

The Nigerian beauty pageant industry positions itself as working to symbolically restore the public face of the nation while seeking to materially shift the private lives of affiliates on the ground.

"This book's message is rooted in the philosophy that people inherently possess the wisdom necessary to make healthy choices and to live in balance. It emphasizes that self-love, acceptance of genetic diversity in body size, celebration of the unique beauty of every individual, and intuitive self-care are fundamental to achieving good physical and emotional health. It encourages readers to shift their focus away from ineffective, harmful weight-loss efforts towards improving and sustaining positive self-care behaviors. Initial research indicates that this work significantly improves people's ability to regulate eating, decreases depression and anxiety, and increases self-esteem--all critical resources that promote resiliency against eating and body image problems. Embody guides readers step-by-step through the five core competencies of the Body Positive's model: Reclaim Health, Practice Intuitive Self-Care, Cultivate Self-Love, Declare Your Own Authentic Beauty, and Build Community. These competencies are fundamental skills anyone can practice on a daily basis to honor their innate wisdom and take good care of their whole selves because they are motivated by self-love and appreciation. Rather than dictating a prescriptive set of rules to follow, readers are guided through patient, mindful inquiry to find what works uniquely in their own lives to bring about--and sustain--positive self-care changes and a peaceful relationship with their bodies"--