Mother S Milk And Male Fantasy In Nineteenth Century French Narrative

Should all mothers breast-feed their children? This question remains controversial in the twenty-first century. In an interview with the newspaper Liberation in 2010, feminist philosopher Elisabeth Badinter claimed that the pressure to breast-feed signified “a reduction of woman to the status of an animal species, as though we were all female chimpanzees.” The debate over maternal nursing held even more urgency before pasteurization provided a safe alternative in the early 1900s. While scholars of literary criticism and art history have described the abundance of breast-feeding imagery following the publication of Rousseau’s Emile in 1762, little has been written on its manifestations in the nineteenth century. Despite an ongoing propaganda campaign to encourage mothers to nurse, reflected in such diverse sources as medical theses, paintings, and fictional cautionary tales, French mothers continued to entrust their infants to wet nurses more often and for longer than was the norm in other European countries throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. This book examines representations of breast-feeding in French literature and culture from 1800 to 1900 and their apparent dissonance with the socio-historical realities of French mothers.

Should all mothers breast-feed their children? This question remains controversial in the twenty-first century. In an interview with the newspaper Liberation in 2010, feminist philosopher Elisabeth Badinter claimed that the pressure to breast-feed signified "a reduction of woman to the statusof an animal species, as though we were all female chimpanzees."The debate over maternal nursing held even more urgency before pasteurization provided a safe alternative in the early 1900s. While scholars of literary criticism and art history have described the abundance of breast-feeding imagery following the publication of Rousseau's Emile in 1762, little hasbeen written on its manifestations in the nineteenth century. Despite an ongoing propaganda campaign to encourage mothers to nurse, reflected in such diverse sources as medical theses, paintings, and fictional cautionary tales, French mothers continued to entrust their infants to wet nurses moreoften and for longer than was the norm in other European countries throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.This book examines representations of breast-feeding in French literature and culture from 1800 to 1900 and their apparent dissonance with the socio-historical realities of French mothers.

In Pet Projects, Elizabeth Young joins an analysis of the representation of animals in nineteenth-century fiction, taxidermy, and the visual arts with a first-person reflection on her own scholarly journey. Centering on Margaret Marshall Saunders, a Canadian woman writer once famous for her animal novels, and incorporating Young’s own experience of a beloved animal’s illness, this study highlights the personal and intellectual stakes of a “pet project” of cultural criticism. Young assembles a broad archive of materials, beginning with Saunders’s novels and widening outward to include fiction, nonfiction, photography, and taxidermy. She coins the term “first-dog voice” to describe the narrative technique of novels, such as Saunders’s Beautiful Joe, written in the first person from the perspective of an animal. She connects this voice to contemporary political issues, revealing how animal fiction such as Saunders’s reanimates nineteenth-century writing about both feminism and slavery. Highlighting the prominence of taxidermy in the late nineteenth century, she suggests that Saunders transforms taxidermic techniques in surprising ways that provide new forms of authority for women. Young adapts Freud to analyze literary representations of mourning by and for animals, and she examines how Canadian writers, including Saunders, use animals to explore race, ethnicity, and national identity. Her wide-ranging investigation incorporates twenty-first as well as nineteenth-century works of literature and culture, including recent art using taxidermy and contemporary film. Throughout, she reflects on the tools she uses to craft her analyses, examining the state of scholarly fields from feminist criticism to animal studies. With a lively, first-person voice that highlights experiences usually concealed in academic studies by scholarly discourse—such as detours, zigzags, roadblocks, and personal experience—this unique and innovative book will delight animal enthusiasts and academics in the fields of animal studies, gender studies, American studies, and Canadian studies.

During the nineteenth century, words like 'intersex' and 'trans' had not yet been invented to describe individuals whose bodies, or senses of self, conflicted with binary sex. But that does not mean that such people did not exist. In nineteenth-century France, case studies filled medical journals, high-profile trials captured headlines, and doctors staked their reputations on sex determinations only to have them later reversed by colleagues. While medical experts fought over what separated a man from a woman, novelists began to explore debates about binary sex and describe the experiences of gender-ambiguous characters. Anne Linton discusses over 200 newly-uncovered case studies while offering fresh readings of literature by several famous writers of the period, as well as long-overlooked popular fiction. This landmark contribution to the history of sexuality is the first book to examine intersex in both medicine and literature, sensitively relating historical 'hermaphrodism' to contemporary intersex activism and scholarship.

An innovative study revealing that folklore collections can shed new light on the lives of the socially marginalized.

"Kari Weil's new book takes readers back to an era when horses were an inescapable part of daily life and when horse ownership became an increasingly realizable dream, not just for soldiers, but for middle-class (bourgeois) boys and girls. It charts the rise of the horse as an integral part of daily life in Paris (as work, sport, and food) and the social, political, and affective changes that brought about and followed from the presence of horses on streets and in parks, in the show ring and race track, and even on plates. It also ably traces a rise in "equestrian rhetoric," whose sexual, class, and racial inflections were influenced both by Anglomania and by colonialist attraction to the "hot-blooded" horses of Arab countries. Moving between literature, painting, natural philosophy, popular cartoons, sport manuals, and tracts of public hygiene, this book seeks to understand the changing relations to horses who straddled conceptions of pet and livestock, existing between objects of affection, on the one hand, and material as well as symbolic capital, on the other"--

One of The Tablet's Books of the Year 2021 Portraits of Wollstonecraft collects and introduces 102 texts and artifacts that document Mary Wollstonecraft's public reception in art, literature, philosophy and feminist politics. Each portrait is a milestone in her depiction in culture. From William Blake's 1803 poem 'Mary' to Maggi Hambling's contentious sculpture in 2020, these sources validate the monumental place Wollstonecraft holds in not just one but many canons. The color images in Part I: Public Sightings trace her earliest reception in portraiture, from 1785 to 1804, with detailed analysis paired with each of the illustrations. Arranged chronologically, these landmark images are followed by the reviews of Wollstonecraft's books that appeared during her lifetime in Jamaica, Madrid, Amsterdam and London. Part II: Global Afterlives, examines her multifarious posthumous reception and features diary entries, excerpts from English-language biographies, letters, articles and introductions to her books. From Olive Schreiner's introduction to the Rights of Women composed in Cape Town in 1889 to the translator's preface to the first Czech edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1904, they showcase an impressive sweep of cross-cultural perspectives on her life and writings. The sources in Part III: Making an International Icon chart the depth and breadth of her legacies on a global scale. Feminists, philosophers, and social scientists-from Ruth Benedict to Virginia Sapiro to Amartya Sen-have written and spoken with conviction about the emotional power of looking into the eyes of the author of the Rights of Woman. This section includes major thinkers from across the 19th and 20th centuries who responded to Wollstonecraft's theories on virtue, love, gender, education, and rights: Mary Shelley, Emma Goldman, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Susan Moller Okin, Barbara Johnson and Martha Nussbaum. We see how Wollstonecraft gained traction in feminist politics, both as a philosopher and as a transcultural icon of the cause, beginning with English suffragist Millicent Fawcett's centennial edition of the Rights of Woman in 1891 and extending through feminist art in The Paris Review during the age of #MeToo. Assembling responses from Ireland, Continental Europe, North and South America and across the former colonies of the British Empire, this one-of-a-kind collection tells a compelling story of Wollstonecraft's watershed contributions to human rights debates throughout the modern and contemporary world.