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.

Jennifer S. Henke is a literary and cultural studies scholar with a PhD from the University of Bremen, Germany, and a Venia Legendi for Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Bonn, Germany.

1.PART I | Mapping the Field, 1.1. Introduction: In the Delivery Room, 1.2. Context: Historicising the Reproductive Body, 1.3. Framework: Beyond Representationalism, 2. PART II | Science, Sex & Secret Bodies of Knowledge, 2.1. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), 2.2. John Cleland's Fanny Hill (1749), 2.3. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759), 2.4. Eliza Fenwick's Secresy, Or: The Ruin on the Rock (1795), 2.5. Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, Or: The Wrongs of Woman (1798), 2.6. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Or: The Modern Prometheus (1818), 3. PART III | Stitching the Pieces Together, 3.1 Stitching, 4.Bibliography