Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic

Julie Kipp examines Romantic writers' treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies through the lens of the legal, medical, educational, and socioeconomic debates about motherhood so prevalent during the Romantic period. These discussions rendered the physical processes associated with mothering matters of national importance. Kipp's primary concern is to trace ways that writers deployed representations of mother-child bonds variously as a means to naturalize, endorse, and critique Enlightenment constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations.