Breastfeeding in American Women's Literature

Latching on
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-72219-1
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 148 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 372 g

Reihe: Routledge Research in Women's Literature

Rather than rarities, literary depictions of women breastfeeding infants are more common in American literature than recognized. In some cases, readers have dismissed such portrayals as scenic background or strokes of verisimilitude. In other cases, we have failed to register them at all. By cataloging and closely reading scenes of characters breastfeeding across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, this book decodes the beliefs of writers as celebrated as Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich and as current as Camille Dungy, Maggie Nelson, and Torrey Peters. It traces in these authors’ fantasies and fears the consistent and sometimes competing cultural ideologies that accrue over decades and find expression in breastfeeding scenes. Despite the different historical and cultural expectations of what a mother should be and do, twentieth and twenty-first-century women writers have consistently singled out maternal pleasure—a mother’s privileging of her own desire—as the most important theme attending scenes of breastfeeding.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Whelan-Stewart, Wendy

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

1.      Caroline Kirkland’s Pioneer Women and the Busy Breast

2.      Breastfeeding as Good Husbandry in Willa Cather’s Fiction

3.      Women’s Utopias and the Problem of Breastfeeding

4.      The Passions of Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich’s Breastfeeding Mothers

5.      Nursing an Eco-Maternal Ethics: Maggie Nelson and Camille Dungy

Conclusion

Work Cited

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Wendy Whelan-Stewart is Associate Professor of English and the coordinator of the English Master of Arts Program at McNeese State University. She received her doctorate in American Literature, with a minor in Feminist Theory and Women's Studies, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She teaches American literature and focuses her research on contemporary North American women writers.