Reproduction and the Maternal Body in Literature and Culture

This book examines a selection of texts to illuminate how midwifery, obstetrics and women’s bodies were viewed during the long eighteenth century, and how these material-discursive entanglements between science, medicine, literature and culture have shaped society's views of pregnancy, childbirth and reproduction.

Drawing on feminist theories, including feminist new materialism, this book traces the history of both the reproductive body and the medical knowledges that attended to pregnancy and childbirth during the Enlightenment and early Romanticism in Britain. It identifies the significance of literary and cultural artefacts, including the materiality of the female reproductive body itself, for this knowledge formation, and raises awareness of myths and misconceptions about childbirth that are still very much alive today. It includes chapters looking at Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, Or: The Ruin on the Rock, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Or: The Wrongs of Woman, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Reproduction and the Maternal Body in Literature and Culture is an innovative and interdisciplinary contribution to the medical humanities and feminist philosophy of science, and will interest scholars from a range of backgrounds, including literature and cultural studies, midwifery, medicine and history.