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Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Stomach And Womb: Early Modern Recipes For The Perinatal Woman, Grace E. Beacham
Stomach And Womb: Early Modern Recipes For The Perinatal Woman, Grace E. Beacham
English Theses
Stomach and Womb examines the recipes from early modern obstetrical treatises and midwifery manuals, revealing an ontology of parturiency that winds through the concurrent Shakespearean plays, Twelfth Night and The Winter’s Tale. Gynecological and obstetrical texts from the era detail how pregnant women were to order themselves after conception with utmost concern for their diet, governing the outputs of their bodies by managing the inputs, the foods they ingested before, during, and after pregnancy and childbirth. Further, the associated images of the stomach and the womb during this time present an essential link between foodways and a construct of …
The Quick And The Dead (And The Transported), Manushag N. Powell
The Quick And The Dead (And The Transported), Manushag N. Powell
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
In most nations that still execute prisoners—including the U.S.—it is illegal to execute a pregnant person. In English common law, women have been permitted to “plead the belly” in one form or another since the 14th century, and this fact is sometimes misconstrued by anti-choice and forced-birth advocates as evidence of a long legal tradition of protection for the lives of fetuses. In fact, it is merely evidence of a long history of legal inconsistencies in the ways laws were applied and sentences carried out against women, for whom there were fewer options for clemency than for men. This …
Havens And Covens: Pregnancy, Witchcraft, And Female Power In Cotton Mather’S “Retired Elizabeth”, Brittney A. Hatchett
Havens And Covens: Pregnancy, Witchcraft, And Female Power In Cotton Mather’S “Retired Elizabeth”, Brittney A. Hatchett
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
Over the decades, scholars have been holding two adjacent conversations about witchcraft and gender in Cotton Mather’s works that surprisingly have not been put in dialogue. On the one hand, they have examined Mather’s witchcraft ideology and motivations for involving himself in the Salem witch trials. On the other hand, scholars have discussed how Mather seeks to exert control over women spiritually and physically. However, no one has yet explored how these conversations might converge. I suggest that we can see how Mather intertwines discourses of witchcraft and gender in the section titled “Retired Elizabeth” in The Angel of Bethesda. …
“I Suppose An Island Dweller Should Expect It To Be So”: The Contradiction And Drama Of Maternity And Islands In Caleb’S Crossing, Shayla Frandsen
“I Suppose An Island Dweller Should Expect It To Be So”: The Contradiction And Drama Of Maternity And Islands In Caleb’S Crossing, Shayla Frandsen
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
Islands have a long tradition of capturing human imagination and functioning as a space that nurtures both magic and mystery. As geographic locations, they seem to avoid easy taxonomy even while behaving easily categorizable: they exist as tourist fantasies separate from everyday landscape even while many operate as an othered land that is still “safe” enough to visit. They are isolated yet capable of nurturing strong cultural identity. They also act as autonomous entities while still being interconnected within larger natural structures, coastlines, and waterways. In these ways and more islands navigate as border spaces of inherent contradiction—contradictions which are …
From The Womb To The Word: Pregnancy And Pregnancy Metaphors In 16th And 17th Century English Literature, Kelly S. Westeen
From The Womb To The Word: Pregnancy And Pregnancy Metaphors In 16th And 17th Century English Literature, Kelly S. Westeen
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation employs a feminist theoretical lens in exploring the gendered uses of pregnancy and pregnancy metaphors in the production and dissemination of literary works in early modern England. By also examining the history of the printing press and the role it played in gendered textual production, early modern constructs of family and the role of mothers, as well as obstetric medicine and childbirth, I aim to demonstrate that mothering and authorship were congruent activities for female writers. Conversely, I argue that male writers of the period who employed metaphors of gestation did so not to try to claim biological …
"To Conceive With Child Is The Earnest Desire If Not Of All, Yet Of Most Women": The Advancement Of Prenatal Care And Childbirth In Early Modern England: 1500-1770, Victoria E.C. Glover
"To Conceive With Child Is The Earnest Desire If Not Of All, Yet Of Most Women": The Advancement Of Prenatal Care And Childbirth In Early Modern England: 1500-1770, Victoria E.C. Glover
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis analyzes medical manuals published in England between 1500 and 1770 to trace developing medical understandings and prescriptive approaches to conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. While there have been plenty of books written regarding social and religious changes in the reproductive process during the early modern era, there is a dearth of scholarly work focusing on the medical changes which took place in obstetrics over this period. Early modern England was a time of great change in the field of obstetrics as physicians incorporated newly-discovered knowledge about the male and female body, new fields and tools, and new or revived …
Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods
Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation articulates the tendency of Victorian novels to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters tend to go undescribed. Tracing the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth over the course of the long nineteenth century, my chapters demonstrate the function of moralizing narrative conventions in the representation of pregnancy in mid-Victorian novels, of a self-conscious use of free indirect diagnosis in high-Victorian fiction, and a shift at the fin-de-siècle from pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symptom of unstable minds. The novels I read closely …
“A Brutal, Indecent Spectacle”: Heterosexuality, Futurity, And Go Tell It On The Mountain, Mason Stokes
“A Brutal, Indecent Spectacle”: Heterosexuality, Futurity, And Go Tell It On The Mountain, Mason Stokes
English
In this essay I argue that Baldwin’s depiction of queer possibility depends on the spectacular failure of heterosexuality to ensure the future, a failure that ultimately severs heterosexuality from its procreative logics and justifications. Gabriel is torn between competing drives: his desire to ensure the Grimes line and desire itself. Ironically, the latter troubles the former, as the excess of sexual desire threatens to overrun the marital and procreative logics that make the heterosexual normative. Gabriel models heterosexuality as both desire and procreative engine, highlighting the ways in which heterosexuality contains within itself the seeds of its own undoing.
The Importance Of Motherhood, Kate Heath
The Importance Of Motherhood, Kate Heath
Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works
No abstract provided.
Rae, Baby, Whitney Marissa Call
Rae, Baby, Whitney Marissa Call
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis is a young adult fictional novel from the perspective of Rachel Jackson, or Rae, a seventeen year-old girl with Williams Syndrome, a rare developmental disorder caused by missing genes on chromosome 7 that causes those with it to lack logical connections, yet possess very gregarious, social, and musical personalities. Think of it as an inverted form of autism. At the genesis of the novel, Rae becomes pregnant. Upon misunderstanding her mother's sugar-coated reasoning for giving the baby up for adoption, Rae spends the novel trying to find a man to marry so that, in her understanding, she may …
The Boy Who Would Have Been, Deborah Adelman
Learning To Create: A Collection Of Personal Essays, Naomi Lund Christiansen
Learning To Create: A Collection Of Personal Essays, Naomi Lund Christiansen
Theses and Dissertations
This is a creative thesis that focuses on the infertility experiences of the author. The introduction examines the author's justification for choosing personal essay as a genre and French feminism as the guiding theory in writing the essays. Six personal essays center on the author's attempts to have a child and the discoveries and failures along the way. Throughout literary history, women's bodies have traditionally been viewed from the outside looking in, as objects to be reified and preserved or exploited and used. Using the writing the body critics as a theoretical framework, the essays discuss the comforts and discomforts …
Near Confinement: Pregnant Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Cynthia N. Malone
Near Confinement: Pregnant Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Cynthia N. Malone
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
The Boy Who Would Have Been, Deborah Adelman
The Boy Who Would Have Been, Deborah Adelman
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.