Physical bodies remain a cultural preoccupation – their maintenance is debated and obsessed over in every news cycle, food and diet bloggers meticulously photograph everything they put in their mouths, and body-modifying surgeries and “lifestyle” protocols constitute a multibillion-dollar industry. This course examines twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary responses to the persistent, problematic fantasy of remaking human bodies to bring them into alignment with standards of beauty, health – or something else entirely. Readings will take us from speculative fiction to dirty realism, Netflix shows to biopolitical and fat acceptance theory. Authors may include H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, Mary Gordon, and Roxane Gay. What do these narratives make of the gore and violence beneath the peaceful façade of bodily care and feeding, from the banal to the alien?