Description: Josephine McDonagh examines the concept of child murder in British culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by analyzing texts drawn from economics, philosophy, law, and medicine, as well as literature. McDonagh highlights the ways in which child murder echoes and reverberates in a variety of cultural debates and social practices. She traces a trajectory from Swift's A Modest Proposal through the debates on the New Woman at the turn of the twentieth century by way of Burke, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, George Egerton, and Thomas Hardy, among others.
Brief description: Josephine McDonagh is Reader in Romantic and Victorian Culture in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of De Quincey's Disciplines (1994) and George Eliot (1997) and co-editor of Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2001).
Review Quotes: "What impresses most of all (quite apart from the delight of witnessing her deft deployment of all kinds of fascinating circumstantial details), is the way in which she demonstrates that 'child murder carries out its effects not only within a designated moment, but also over time.' This is an important study not just because of its careful tracing of the many ramifications of this emotive (and emotively deployed) theme over two centuries, but also because it offers an exemplary account of how we might go about studying the complex phenomenon of cultural transmission." Kate Flint, Studies in English Literature