Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic [Paperback]

Julie Kipp examines Romantic writers' treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies.Julie Kipp examines Romantic writers' treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies in the context of the legal, medical, educational and socioeconomic debates about motherhood so popular during the period. She argues that these discussions turned the physical processes associated with mothering into matters of national importance.Julie Kipp examines Romantic writers' treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies in the context of the legal, medical, educational and socioeconomic debates about motherhood so popular during the period. She argues that these discussions turned the physical processes associated with mothering into matters of national importance.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.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. 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 lc'