Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature

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).

lt;p>Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Mary Toft's Performance: Imagining Powerful Pregnancies in Pantomime and Pamphlets.- Chapter 3: "For one would be loath to spoil a son and heir": the Power of Maternal Imagination in Fiction of the Mid Eighteenth-Century.- Chapter 4: ''Tis My Father's Fault': Tristram Shandy and Paternal Imagination.- Chapter 5: "I'll repress the rising anguish/Till thine eyes behold the light": Passionate Responsibility in Maternal Poetry.- Chapter 6: Romantic Imagination and Maternal Guilt in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.- Afterbirth: The Discourse of Maternal Imagination After the Eighteenth Century.

lt;p>"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)