Description:
This book explores the legacy of English-language women's writing about pregnancy and childbirth during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Examining the work of authors such as Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin, Margaret Drabble, and Toni Morrison, this book posits a literary corpus of procreativity.
Review Quotes:
In this fascinating and wide-ranging book, Francisco José Cortés Vieco seeks to restore the centrality and even intelligibility of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in classic works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American female writers that he argues structures of patriarchy have denied them. Sparkling with insights and a pleasure to read. (Professor Elizabeth Lunbeck, Harvard University)
This is a historically wide-ranging account of the tropes of pregnancy and childbirth in women's literature. Cortés Vieco's learned study combines theoretical expertise and thorough, insightful close readings to revisit the connections between women's creativity and procreativity, while resisting essentialist equations of maternity and womanhood. (Dr Karin Koehler, Bangor University, UK)