Conceived in modernism
Subtitle: the aesthetics and politics of birth control
By: Aimee Armande Wilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2015
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781501307133
Subjects: LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist; Feminism and literature; History and criticism; English literature; American literature; LITERARY CRITICISM / Women Authors; Modernism (Literature); Family planning in literature; Birth control; Pregnancy in literature; History
Description: "Current debates about birth control can be surprisingly volatile, especially given the near-universal use of contraception among American and British women. Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control offers a new perspective on these debates by demonstrating that the political positions surrounding birth control have roots in literary concerns, specifically those of modernist writers. Whereas most scholarship treats modernism and birth control activism as parallel, but ultimately separate, movements, Conceived in Modernism shows that they were deeply intertwined. This book argues not only that literary concerns exerted a lasting influence on the way activists framed the emerging politics of contraception, but that birth control activism helped shape some of modernism's most innovative concepts. By revealing the presence of literary aesthetics in the discourse surrounding birth control, Conceived in Modernism helps us see this discourse as a variable facet rather than a permanent bulwark of reproductive rights debates"--

"Offers a new perspective on the politics of contraception by showing that Anglo-American birth control rhetoric has roots in modernism"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: Introduction; title: Chapter 1: Modernism, Monsters, and Margaret Sanger; title: Chapter 2: "God spoke with me to-day": Prophecy, Birth Control, and The Waste Land; title: Chapter 3: "Sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied": Reproduction and the Modernist Aesthetic; title: Chapter 4: Southern Mother, Lethal Fetus; Or How Birth Control Makes a Modernist Out of Flannery O'Connor; title: Chapter 5: Where Alien Abduction Meets Family Planning: Personhood, Race and Reproduction in Octavia Butler's Dawn; title: Coda; title: Bibliography; title: Index.