Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic

by Julie Kipp

Overview

Julie Kipp examines Romantic writers' treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies through the lens of the legal, medical, educational, and socioeconomic debates about motherhood so prevalent during the Romantic period. These discussions rendered the physical processes associated with mothering matters of national importance. Kipp's primary concern is to trace ways that writers deployed representations of mother-child bonds variously as a means to naturalize, endorse, and critique Enlightenment constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521814553
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/14/2003
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #57
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Julie Kipp is Assistant Professor of English at Hope College in Michigan. She is the author of articles on Robert Browning, Friedrich Schlegel, and Maria Edgeworth.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction: naturally bad or dangerously good: romantic-period mothers 'on trial'; 1. Revolutions in mothering: theory and practice; 2. A love too thick: gothic mothers and monstrous sympathies; 3. The Irish wet nurse: Edgeworth's Ennui; 4. Infanticide in an age of enlightenment: Scott's The Heart of Midlothian; 5. The case of the Shelleys: maternal sympathy and The Cenci; Postscript; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Kipp offers sophisticated and nuanced readings of Gothic mothers and their frequently monstrous sympathies, of the figure of the Irish wet nurse, and of maternal sympathy in relation to The Cenci, in a densely argued demonstration of quite how socially and culturally constructed the concept of motherhood is in this period." Kate Flint, Studies in English Literature

"...this book contributes importantly both to the scholarship of motherhood and of nation-making."
Studies in Romanticism

From the Publisher