Author: Jenifer Buckley
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319538357
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
This book reveals the cultural significance of the pregnant woman by examining major eighteenth-century debates concerning separate spheres, man-midwifery, performance, marriage, the body, education, and creative imagination. Exploring medical, economic, moral, and literary ramifications, this book engages critically with the notion that a pregnant woman could alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings. Eighteenth-century authors sought urgently to define, understand and control the concept of maternal imagination as they responded to and provoked fundamental questions about female intellect and the relationship between mind and body. Interrogating the multiple models of maternal imagination both separately and as a holistic set of socio-cultural components, the author uncovers the discourse of maternal imagination across eighteenth-century drama, popular print, medical texts, poetry and novels. This overdue rehabilitation of the pregnant woman in literature is essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth century, gender and literary history.
Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Author: Jenifer Buckley
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319538357
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
This book reveals the cultural significance of the pregnant woman by examining major eighteenth-century debates concerning separate spheres, man-midwifery, performance, marriage, the body, education, and creative imagination. Exploring medical, economic, moral, and literary ramifications, this book engages critically with the notion that a pregnant woman could alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings. Eighteenth-century authors sought urgently to define, understand and control the concept of maternal imagination as they responded to and provoked fundamental questions about female intellect and the relationship between mind and body. Interrogating the multiple models of maternal imagination both separately and as a holistic set of socio-cultural components, the author uncovers the discourse of maternal imagination across eighteenth-century drama, popular print, medical texts, poetry and novels. This overdue rehabilitation of the pregnant woman in literature is essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth century, gender and literary history.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319538357
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
This book reveals the cultural significance of the pregnant woman by examining major eighteenth-century debates concerning separate spheres, man-midwifery, performance, marriage, the body, education, and creative imagination. Exploring medical, economic, moral, and literary ramifications, this book engages critically with the notion that a pregnant woman could alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings. Eighteenth-century authors sought urgently to define, understand and control the concept of maternal imagination as they responded to and provoked fundamental questions about female intellect and the relationship between mind and body. Interrogating the multiple models of maternal imagination both separately and as a holistic set of socio-cultural components, the author uncovers the discourse of maternal imagination across eighteenth-century drama, popular print, medical texts, poetry and novels. This overdue rehabilitation of the pregnant woman in literature is essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth century, gender and literary history.
Author:
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 3265
Book Description
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 3265
Book Description
The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England
Author: E. Clery
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230509045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Book Description
In the Eighteenth-century, critics of capitalism denounced the growth of luxury and effeminacy; supporters applauded the increase of refinement and the improved status of women. This pioneering study explores the way the association of commerce and femininity permeated cultural production. It looks at the first use of a female author as an icon of modernity in the Athenian Mercury , and reappraises works by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mandeville, Defoe, Pope and Elizabeth Carter. Samuel Richardson's novels represent the culmination of the English debate, while contemporary essays by David Hume move towards a fully-fledged enlightenment theory of feminization.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230509045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Book Description
In the Eighteenth-century, critics of capitalism denounced the growth of luxury and effeminacy; supporters applauded the increase of refinement and the improved status of women. This pioneering study explores the way the association of commerce and femininity permeated cultural production. It looks at the first use of a female author as an icon of modernity in the Athenian Mercury , and reappraises works by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mandeville, Defoe, Pope and Elizabeth Carter. Samuel Richardson's novels represent the culmination of the English debate, while contemporary essays by David Hume move towards a fully-fledged enlightenment theory of feminization.
Immaculate Forms
Author: Helen King
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782836349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
'Delightful, timely and critical' Cat Bohannon, author of Eve 'With unrivaled expertise and a wealth of classical and contemporary detail, the author weaves historical knowledge of medicine, anatomy, literature, art and religion into a narrative that surprises, informs, excites and frequently amuses' Adrian Thatcher, author of Vile Bodies Throughout history, religious scholars, medical men and - occasionally - women themselves, have moulded thought on what 'makes' a woman. She has been called the weaker sex, the fairer sex, the purer sex, among many other monikers. Often, she has been defined simply as 'Not A Man'. Today, we are more aware than ever of the complex relationship between our bodies and our identities. But contrary to what some may believe, what makes a woman is a question that has always been open-ended. Immaculate Forms examines all the ways in which medicine and religion have played a gatekeeping role over women's organs. It explores how the womb was seen as both the most miraculous organ in the body and as a sewer; uncovers breasts' legacies as maternal or sexual organs - or both; probes the mystery of the disappearing hymen, and asks, did the clitoris need to be discovered at all?
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782836349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
'Delightful, timely and critical' Cat Bohannon, author of Eve 'With unrivaled expertise and a wealth of classical and contemporary detail, the author weaves historical knowledge of medicine, anatomy, literature, art and religion into a narrative that surprises, informs, excites and frequently amuses' Adrian Thatcher, author of Vile Bodies Throughout history, religious scholars, medical men and - occasionally - women themselves, have moulded thought on what 'makes' a woman. She has been called the weaker sex, the fairer sex, the purer sex, among many other monikers. Often, she has been defined simply as 'Not A Man'. Today, we are more aware than ever of the complex relationship between our bodies and our identities. But contrary to what some may believe, what makes a woman is a question that has always been open-ended. Immaculate Forms examines all the ways in which medicine and religion have played a gatekeeping role over women's organs. It explores how the womb was seen as both the most miraculous organ in the body and as a sewer; uncovers breasts' legacies as maternal or sexual organs - or both; probes the mystery of the disappearing hymen, and asks, did the clitoris need to be discovered at all?
The Male Body in Medicine and Literature
Author: Andrew Mangham
Publisher:
ISBN: 1786940523
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
With the dawn of modern medicine there emerged a complex range of languages and methodologies for portraying the male body as prone to illness, injury and dysfunction. Using a variety of historical and literary approaches, this collection explores how medicine has interacted with key moments in literature and culture.
Publisher:
ISBN: 1786940523
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
With the dawn of modern medicine there emerged a complex range of languages and methodologies for portraying the male body as prone to illness, injury and dysfunction. Using a variety of historical and literary approaches, this collection explores how medicine has interacted with key moments in literature and culture.
Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century
Author: Jennifer Evans
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783319830018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
This multi-disciplinary collection brings together work by scholars from Britain, America and Canada on the popular, personal and institutional histories of pregnancy. It follows the process of reproduction from conception and contraception, to birth and parenthood. The contributors explore several key themes: narratives of pregnancy and birth, the patient-consumer, and literary representations of childbearing. This book explores how these issues have been constructed, represented and experienced in a range of geographical locations from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Crossing the boundary between the pre-modern and modern worlds, the chapters reveal the continuities, similarities and differences in understanding a process that is often, in the popular mind-set, considered to be fundamental and unchanging.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783319830018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
This multi-disciplinary collection brings together work by scholars from Britain, America and Canada on the popular, personal and institutional histories of pregnancy. It follows the process of reproduction from conception and contraception, to birth and parenthood. The contributors explore several key themes: narratives of pregnancy and birth, the patient-consumer, and literary representations of childbearing. This book explores how these issues have been constructed, represented and experienced in a range of geographical locations from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Crossing the boundary between the pre-modern and modern worlds, the chapters reveal the continuities, similarities and differences in understanding a process that is often, in the popular mind-set, considered to be fundamental and unchanging.
Medicalizing Difference
Author: Stephanie M. Hilger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350374938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205
Book Description
Exploring 18th-century medicine's construction of individuals with non-standard sexual anatomy as “hermaphrodites”, this book focuses on the genre of the case history from three different languages and national contexts-British, French, and German. Medicalizing Difference examines case studies written about Anne Grandjean, Michel Anne Drouart, Maria Dorothea Derrier, and an unnamed “Angolan hermaphrodite.” Multiple case studies were published about each of these individuals and are discussed throughout the book's four chapters, each of which focuses on one momentous epistemological shift in the eighteenth-century: an increasing focus on empiricism and the related professionalization of medicine, the expanding market for popular scientific literature, changing notions about generation and reproduction, and the exploration of foreign territories. This book reads these case histories against the grain and historicizes 18th-century medicine's construction of the category of the “hermaphrodite”, demonstrating that, rather than describing a fact, these histories created their subject of study
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350374938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205
Book Description
Exploring 18th-century medicine's construction of individuals with non-standard sexual anatomy as “hermaphrodites”, this book focuses on the genre of the case history from three different languages and national contexts-British, French, and German. Medicalizing Difference examines case studies written about Anne Grandjean, Michel Anne Drouart, Maria Dorothea Derrier, and an unnamed “Angolan hermaphrodite.” Multiple case studies were published about each of these individuals and are discussed throughout the book's four chapters, each of which focuses on one momentous epistemological shift in the eighteenth-century: an increasing focus on empiricism and the related professionalization of medicine, the expanding market for popular scientific literature, changing notions about generation and reproduction, and the exploration of foreign territories. This book reads these case histories against the grain and historicizes 18th-century medicine's construction of the category of the “hermaphrodite”, demonstrating that, rather than describing a fact, these histories created their subject of study
Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century
Author: Karen Harvey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521822350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
Publisher Description
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521822350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
Publisher Description
Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford
Author: Katarzyna Burzyńska
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000551911
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
This book explores how the pregnant body is portrayed, perceived and enacted in Shakespeare’s and his contemporaries’ drama by means of a phenomenological analysis and a recourse to early modern popular medical discourse on reproduction. Phenomenology of pregnancy is a fairly new and radical body of philosophy that questions the post-Cartesian chasm of an almost autonomous reason and an enclosed and self-sufficient (male) body as foundations of identity. Early modern drama, as is argued, was written and staged at the backdrop of revolutionary changes in medicine and science where old and new theories on the embodied self-clashed. In this world where more and more men were expected to steadily grow isolated from their bodies, the pregnant body constituted an embattled contradiction. Indebted to the theories of embodiment this book offers a meticulous and detailed investigation of a plethora of pregnant characters and their “pregnant embodiment” in the pre-modern works by Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and Ford. The analysis in each chapter argues for an indivisible link between an intensely embodied experience of pregnancy as enacted in space and identity-shaping processes resulting in a more acute sense of selfhood and agency. Despite seemingly disparate experiences of the selected heroines and the repeated attempts at containment of their “unruly” bodies, the ever transforming and “spatial” pregnant identities remain loci of embodied selfhood and agency. This book provocatively argues that fictional characters’ experience reflects tangible realities of early modern women, while often deflecting the scientific consensus on reproduction in the period.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000551911
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
This book explores how the pregnant body is portrayed, perceived and enacted in Shakespeare’s and his contemporaries’ drama by means of a phenomenological analysis and a recourse to early modern popular medical discourse on reproduction. Phenomenology of pregnancy is a fairly new and radical body of philosophy that questions the post-Cartesian chasm of an almost autonomous reason and an enclosed and self-sufficient (male) body as foundations of identity. Early modern drama, as is argued, was written and staged at the backdrop of revolutionary changes in medicine and science where old and new theories on the embodied self-clashed. In this world where more and more men were expected to steadily grow isolated from their bodies, the pregnant body constituted an embattled contradiction. Indebted to the theories of embodiment this book offers a meticulous and detailed investigation of a plethora of pregnant characters and their “pregnant embodiment” in the pre-modern works by Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and Ford. The analysis in each chapter argues for an indivisible link between an intensely embodied experience of pregnancy as enacted in space and identity-shaping processes resulting in a more acute sense of selfhood and agency. Despite seemingly disparate experiences of the selected heroines and the repeated attempts at containment of their “unruly” bodies, the ever transforming and “spatial” pregnant identities remain loci of embodied selfhood and agency. This book provocatively argues that fictional characters’ experience reflects tangible realities of early modern women, while often deflecting the scientific consensus on reproduction in the period.
The Language of Fruit
Author: Liz Bellamy
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295838
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
In The Language of Fruit, Liz Bellamy explores how poets, playwrights, and novelists from the Restoration to the Romantic era represented fruit and fruit trees in a period that saw significant changes in cultivation techniques, the expansion of the range of available fruit varieties, and the transformation of the mechanisms for their exchange and distribution. Although her principal concern is with the representation of fruit within literary texts and genres, she nevertheless grounds her analysis in the consideration of what actually happened in the gardens and orchards of the past. As Bellamy progresses through sections devoted to specific literary genres, three central "characters" come to the fore: the apple, long a symbol of natural abundance, simplicity, and English integrity; the orange, associated with trade and exchange until its "naturalization" as a British resident; and the pineapple, often figured as a cossetted and exotic child of indulgence epitomizing extravagant luxury. She demonstrates how the portrayal of fruits within literary texts was complicated by symbolic associations derived from biblical and classical traditions, often identifying fruit with female temptation and sexual desire. Looking at seventeenth-century poetry, Restoration drama, eighteenth-century georgic, and the Romantic novel, as well as practical writings on fruit production and husbandry, Bellamy shows the ways in which the meanings and inflections that accumulated around different kinds of fruit related to contemporary concepts of gender, class, and race. Examining the intersection of literary tradition and horticultural innovation, The Language of Fruit traces how writers from Andrew Marvell to Jane Austen responded to the challenges posed by the evolving social, economic, and symbolic functions of fruit over the long eighteenth century.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295838
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
In The Language of Fruit, Liz Bellamy explores how poets, playwrights, and novelists from the Restoration to the Romantic era represented fruit and fruit trees in a period that saw significant changes in cultivation techniques, the expansion of the range of available fruit varieties, and the transformation of the mechanisms for their exchange and distribution. Although her principal concern is with the representation of fruit within literary texts and genres, she nevertheless grounds her analysis in the consideration of what actually happened in the gardens and orchards of the past. As Bellamy progresses through sections devoted to specific literary genres, three central "characters" come to the fore: the apple, long a symbol of natural abundance, simplicity, and English integrity; the orange, associated with trade and exchange until its "naturalization" as a British resident; and the pineapple, often figured as a cossetted and exotic child of indulgence epitomizing extravagant luxury. She demonstrates how the portrayal of fruits within literary texts was complicated by symbolic associations derived from biblical and classical traditions, often identifying fruit with female temptation and sexual desire. Looking at seventeenth-century poetry, Restoration drama, eighteenth-century georgic, and the Romantic novel, as well as practical writings on fruit production and husbandry, Bellamy shows the ways in which the meanings and inflections that accumulated around different kinds of fruit related to contemporary concepts of gender, class, and race. Examining the intersection of literary tradition and horticultural innovation, The Language of Fruit traces how writers from Andrew Marvell to Jane Austen responded to the challenges posed by the evolving social, economic, and symbolic functions of fruit over the long eighteenth century.