Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Jenifer Buckley

   Pages 1-38

3. Mary Toft’s Performance: Imagining Powerful Pregnancies in Pantomime and Pamphlets

   • Jenifer Buckley

   Pages 39-80

4. “For One Would be Loath to Spoil a Son and Heir”: The Power of Maternal Imagination in Fiction of the Mid Eighteenth-Century

   • Jenifer Buckley

   Pages 81-130

5. “’Tis My Father’s Fault”: Tristram Shandy and Paternal Imagination

   • Jenifer Buckley

   Pages 131-188

6. “I’ll Repress the Rising Anguish/Till Thine Eyes Behold the Light”: Passionate Responsibility in Maternal Poetry

   • Jenifer Buckley

   Pages 189-239

7. Romantic Imagination and Maternal Guilt in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

   • Jenifer Buckley

   Pages 241-275

8. Afterbirth: The Discourse of Maternal Imagination After the Eighteenth Century

   • Jenifer Buckley

   Pages 277-284

9. Back Matter

   Pages 285-292

   PDF

This book reveals the cultural significance of the pregnant woman by examining major eighteenth-century debates concerning separate spheres, man-midwifery, performance, marriage, the body, education, and creative imagination. Exploring medical, economic, moral, and literary ramifications, this book engages critically with the notion that a pregnant woman could alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings. Eighteenth-century authors sought urgently to define, understand and control the concept of maternal imagination as they responded to and provoked fundamental questions about female intellect and the relationship between mind and body. Interrogating the multiple models of maternal imagination both separately and as a holistic set of socio-cultural components, the author uncovers the discourse of maternal imagination across eighteenth-century drama, popular print, medical texts, poetry and novels. This overdue rehabilitation of the pregnant woman in literature is essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth century, gender and literary history.

• Motherhood
• Mary Toft
• Sentimental Novel
• Tobias Smollett
• Ramble Fiction
• Tristran Shandy

“Buckley’s volume is a most welcome addition to the scholarship in the field, which tends to analyze pregnancy through the history of medicine … . Buckley has done a splendid job recuperating the history of the maternal imagination in eighteenth-century Britain through its many lenses—medical, literary, social, and cultural—and through its many permutations.” (Marilyn Francus, Eighteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 33 (1), 2020)

“In The Maternal Imagination, Buckley presents significant original evidence of the medical, folkloric, political, and aesthetic roots and occurrences of the trope of maternal imagination in a diverse range of literary genres in the eighteenth century. This comprehensive work is a valuable contribution to the field of eighteenth-century cultural history.” (Rebecca Davies, Associate Professor of English Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway)

• Brighton, UK

  Jenifer Buckley

Jenifer Buckley is the author of the articles ‘“Bankrupt in all but my good wishes”: Speculative Economics in Cleomelia; Or The Generous Mistress’ in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (2014), and ‘”’Tis My Father’s Fault”: Tristram Shandy and Paternal Imagination’ in The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (forthcoming, 2017).

Policies and ethics