Horner, Avril and Angela Keane. Body Matters: Feminism Textuality Corporeality. Manchester (UK): Manchester UP, 2000.

Grinnell library catalog page

As stated in the introduction, this volume in whole “examines ways in which textual representations of female bodies can afford a locus for feminist identities and concerns. At the same time, it offers a particular historical and textual focus and a certain self-reflexiveness concerning the narratives carried by both theory and ‘history’” (7). The book divides into five parts, with each part offering three to four essays pertaining to its central theme--for instance, part one is “Consumption, production and reproduction” and part four is “Re-viewing bodies in fiction.” Other chapters deal with “identity politics’ tacit acceptance of ‘the anatomical as the foundation for cultural difference’” (9), historically and culturally diverse body representations, and the mystical transcendence of mind-body dualism. While chapter essays range in specificity and historical focus, e.g. both Charlotte Bronte and Toni Morrison are the center of separate works, several chapters indeed offer invaluable resources for 1790s research.

In the first chapter “Candid Advice to the Fair Sex: or, the Politics of Maternity in late Eighteenth-Century Britain,” for instance, Gilroy examines Martha Mears’s 1787 antenatal advice book The Pupil of Nature; or, Candid Advice to the Fair Sex and asserts that it “clearly exposes the apparatus of domestic ideology” (26) of the 1790s. Furthermore, Gilroy examines how politics affected the book and vice versa. Gilroy actively incorporates issues and literature concerning the French Revolution, as well as authors like Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, and Charlotte Smith. Chapter two, Angela Keane’s “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Imperious Sympathies: Population, maternity and Romantic individualism,” works to “recover a body that is messing from [Foucault and his feminist critics’] account of population discourse: the body of the mother” (30). Mobilizing social and political theories, the essay discusses both testaments to and subversions to Wollstonecraft’s role as advocate of the restriction of female sexuality to productive maternity. Keane engages the works and philosophies of William Godwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith, as well as Wollstonecraft’s own letters and travel accounts.

Entered by Elisa on 03 August 2004 at 1:27 PM.