The politics of motherhood : British writing and culture, 1680-1760
Through detailed examination of a wide variety of novels, plays, sermons, songs, popular engravings, portraiture, and propaganda from the period, Toni Bowers examines the eighteenth-century struggle to develop a newly private and domestic model of maternal excellence which is still highly influential today.
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xvi, 262 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780521551748, 9780521020336, 0521551749, 0521020336
36430180
Introduction: Historicizing motherhood
pt. 1. Royal Motherhood: Queen Anne and the Politics of Maternal Representation. "The teeming Princess of Denmark": Anne as mother, 1684-1700. "Thy nursing mother": symbolic maternity and royal authority at the Coronation of Queen Anne. Symbolic maternity and practical politics in Queen Anne's England
pt. 2. Monstrous Motherhood: Violence, Difference, and the Subversion of Maternal Ideals. "Unnatural" motherhood in two novels by Daniel Defoe. Dreams of maternal autonomy: scandalous motherhood in three tales by Eliza Haywood. Maternal failure and socioeconomic difference: The Unnatural Mother
pt. 3. Domestic Motherhood: Constraint, Complicity, and the Failure of Maternal Authority. Female virtue and maternal authority in Pamela, Part 2. Maternal virtue and maternal failure in Clarissa
Conclusion: Going public: the case of Lady Sarah Pennington
Appendix: Epilogue to Philips, The Distrest Mother