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Reproduction by design : sex, robots, trees, and test-tube babies in interwar Britain / Angus McLaren.
De Gruyter University of Chicago Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013 Available online
View online- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- McLaren, Angus.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Technology in literature.
- Reproductive technology--England.
- Reproductive technology.
- Reproduction--Social aspects--England.
- Reproduction.
- English literature--20th century--History and criticism.
- English literature.
- Futurism (Literary movement).
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (245 p.)
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Place of Publication:
- Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2012.
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- Modernity in interwar Europe frequently took the form of a preoccupation with mechanizing the natural; fears and fantasies revolved around the notion that the boundaries between people and machines were collapsing. Reproduction in particular became a battleground for those debating the merits of the modern world. That debate continues today, and to understand the history of our anxieties about modernity, we can have no better guide than Angus McLaren. In Reproduction by Design, McLaren draws on novels, plays, science fiction, and films of the 1920s and '30s, as well as the work of biologists, psychiatrists, and sexologists, to reveal surprisingly early debates on many of the same questions that shape the conversation today: homosexuality, recreational sex, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, sex change operations, and in vitro fertilization. Here, McLaren brings together the experience and perception of modernity with sexuality, technology, and ecological concerns into a cogent discussion of science's place in reproduction in British and American cultural history.
- Contents:
- Speculative literature and mechanistic progress
- "The standardized world we are facing and fearing": sex and futurist fictions
- "What is better, a car or a wife?": automobiles and modern bodies
- "A race of human machines": robots and reproduction
- Beyond the predictive: sex in real time
- "A sort of animal or mechanic immortality": glands and eugenics
- "A spinster and a syringe": debating test-tube babies
- Romantic racialism
- "Breeding a race apart from nature": ruralists and conservationists.
- Notes:
- Description based upon print version of record.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)
- ISBN:
- 9786613530158
- 9781280126291
- 1280126299
- 9780226560717
- 0226560716
- OCLC:
- 779173020
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