Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900

ISBN-13: 9780521781930 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 296 str.

Josephine McDonagh

Opis

Josephine McDonagh examines the concept of child murder in British culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by analyzing texts drawn from economics, philosophy, law, and medicine, as well as literature. McDonagh highlights the ways in which child murder echoes and reverberates in a variety of cultural debates and social practices. She traces a trajectory from Swift's A Modest Proposal through the debates on the New Woman at the turn of the twentieth century by way of Burke, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, George Egerton, and Thomas Hardy, among others.

Recenzje

'There is much here for the literary scholar and the historian, as the book situates an emotive theme within a wide-ranging cultural framework.' BARS Bulletin

Spis treści

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Note on references; List of abbreviations; Introduction: plots and protagonists; 1. Child murder and commercial society in the early eighteenth century; 2. 'A squeeze in the neck for bastards': the uncivilised spectacle of child-killing in the 1770s and 1780s; 3. 1789/1803: Martha Ray, the mob, and Malthus's Mistress of the Feast; 4. 'Bright and countless everywhere': the New Poor Law and the politics of prolific reproduction in 1839; 5. 'A nation of infanticides': child murder and the national forgetting in Adam Bede; 6. Wragg's daughters: child murder towards the fin de siècle; 7. English babies and Irish changelings; Appendix: on the identity of 'Marcus'; Notes; Bibliography; Index.