Inventing Maternity [electronic resource] : Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650-1865 / edited by Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Barash, Carol.

Greenfield, Susan C.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motherhood--Political aspects.

Motherhood.

Motherhood in literature.

Motherhood--History.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (286 p.)

Place of Publication:

Lexington, Kentucky : The University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Not until the eighteenth century was the image of the tender, full-time mother invented. This image retains its power today. Inventing Maternity demonstrates that, despite its association with an increasingly standardized set of values, motherhood remained contested terrain. Drawing on feminist, cultural, and postcolonial theory, Inventing Maternity surveys a wide range of sources--medical texts, political tracts, religious doctrine, poems, novels, slave narratives, conduct books, and cookbooks. The first half of the volume, covering the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, consid

Contents:

Cover; Half-title; Title; Copyright; Contents; Preface; Introduction; 1 Making Up for Losses: The Workings of Gender in William Harvey's de Generatione animalium; Notes; 2 ""Such Is My Bond"": Maternity and Economy in Anne Bradstreet's Writing; Christian Bondage; Paternal Bonds; Marital Bonds; Maternal Bonds; Maternity and Publication; Notes; 3 Aborting the ""Mother Plot"": Politics and Generation in Absalom and Achitophel; Notes; 4 The Pregnant Imagination, Women's Bodies, and Fetal Rights; Prologue; Notes

5 ""A Point of Conscience"": Breastfeeding and Maternal Authority in Pamela, Part 2Afterword; Notes; 6 Mary Wollstonecraft: Styles of Radical Maternity; Notes; 7 Maria Edgeworth and the Politics of Consumption: Eating, Breastfeeding, and the Irish Wet Nurse in Ennui; Notes; 8 Reproductive Urges: Literacy, Sexuality, and Eighteenth-Century Englishness; Patrilineage, Continuity, and the Trouble with Language; Matrilineage, Reproduction, and the Trouble with Sex; Jane Austen and the Perils of Reading Novels; Notes; 9 Infanticide and the Boundaries of Culture from Hume to Arnold; Notes

10 ""Happy Shall He Be, That Taketh and Dasheth Thy Little Ones against the Stones"": Infanticide in Cooper's The Last of the MohicansInfanticide in The Last of the Mohicans; ""Partial Relatives""; Regeneration through Self-Making; Notes; 11 Reforming the Body: ""Experience"" and the Architecture of Imagination in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a SlaveGirl; ""Experience"" Space, and Motherhood under Slavery; The Flowery Home Ravaged; The Maternal Body and the Hiding (of) Place; Notes; Contributors; Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8131-3272-X

0-8131-5898-2

OCLC:

654974290