Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre by Dara Rossman Regaig

Description: Writing Maternity by Dara Rossman Regaignon Traces the rhetorical origins of maternal anxiety in Victorian literature, bringing uptake and genre ecology into literary studies. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description When did mothers start worrying so much? Why do they keep worrying so? Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre answers these questions by identifying the nineteenth-century rhetorical origins of maternal anxiety, inviting readers to think about worrying not as something individual mothers do but as an affect that since Victorian times has defined middle-class motherhood itself. In this book, Dara Rossman Regaignon offers the first comprehensive study of child-rearing advice literature from early-nineteenth-century Britain and argues that the historical emergence of that genre catalyzed a durable shift in which maternal care was identified as maternal anxiety. Tracing the rhetorical circulation of this affect from advice literature through the memoirs of Mary Martha Sherwood (1775-1851) and Catharine Tait (1819-1878), as well as fiction by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, and Charlotte Mary Yonge, Regaignon gives maternal anxiety a literary-rhetorical history. She does this by bringing concepts such as uptake and genre ecology into literary studies from rhetorical genre theory, making a case for a mobile and culturally influential notion of genre. Examining specific case studies on child death, paid childcare, and infant doping, among others, Regaignon argues that the ideology of nurturing motherhood was predicated upon the rhetorical cultivation of maternal anxiety-which has had significant consequences for the experience of motherhood and maternal feeling. Author Biography Dara Rossman Regaignon is Associate Professor of English at New York University. Table of Contents List of Illustrations Preface Historicizing Maternal Anxiety Acknowledgments Chapter 1 The Rhetorical Origins of Maternal Anxiety Chapter 2 Of Mothers and Medical Men: Advice as Genre Chapter 3 Probability and Premature Death: Child Mortality, Prolepsis, and the Serial Novel Chapter 4 Supervisory Attention and Maternal Management: Paralipsis, Paid Childcare, and Novelistic Perspective Chapter 5 Godfreys Cordial and an Opium Pill: Empire, Family, and Maternal Attention Coda Genre as Advice Works Cited Index Review "Writing Maternity has much to offer to anyone with an interest in womens writing, gender roles, or literature and medicine and will keep readers engaged from the first page to the last." --Ashleigh Blackwood, Womens Writing "Regaignons distinct methodological approach yields valuable insights for periodical studies scholars about motherhood, child-rearing, and babyhood." --Kristin E. Kondrlik, Victorian Periodicals Review"[Writing Maternity] is impressively succinct, packing a carefully nuanced study of the rhetorical effect of various literary genres (childrearing advice literature, memoir, and popular fiction) on maternal emotion in Victorian-era Britain....Compellingly, Regaignons study aids in illuminating a direct connection between mothering, class, and nation-building....It provides an important basis for thinking about the part women have played and continue to play in the development of nations (not just symbolically) and the psychological impacts of that role." --Amber Gill, H-Net"[An] engaging, important book ... To better capture--and perhaps revise--cultural and scientific discourses, Writing Maternity shows why we should bring rhetorical studies into closer conversation with literary studies. This book is also a significant contribution to the study of maternity and care." --Livia Arndal Woods, Review 19"Writing Maternity offers a detailed and nuanced discussion of the cultural formation of anxious parenting in the nineteenth century. Employing rhetorical genre theory as a critical lens, Regaignon makes an exciting contribution to studies of emotion and of parenting." --Tamara S. Wagner, author of The Victorian Baby in Print"Regaignons valuable and convincing book historicizes the anxious affects of middle-class motherhood. Attentive to material conditions and historical readerships, Regaignon illuminates the links among embodiment, affect, and genre in this elegant and engagingly written study." --Risa Applegarth, author of Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science Review Quote " Writing Maternity offers a detailed and nuanced discussion of the cultural formation of anxious parenting in the nineteenth century. Employing rhetorical genre theory as a critical lens, Regaignon makes an exciting contribution to studies of emotion and of parenting." --Tamara S. Wagner, author of The Victorian Baby in Print Excerpt from Book In Writing Maternity , I argue that historically if not personally, maternal anxiety is a rhetorically catalyzed and perpetuated affect, a naturalized aspect of normative modern motherhood. Rather than marking the neurosis or failure of particular women, this emotion is precisely attached to the arrangement and control over temporal and spatial processes that is the managerial role in the neoliberal economy. Focusing the attention of those who identify as mothers on the future of the Child and the space of the domestic sphere, maternal anxiety is an essential, affective component of patriarchal capitalism, engineering its production and (re)production through genres and generations. The emotion, I contend, became an essential motivating component of the ideology of nurturing motherhood as that formation rose to dominance in newly industrialized Britain. Like that ideology, maternal anxiety inheres in and grounds the formations of the emergent middle class and its attendant systems of bourgeois individualism, patriarchal familiality, gendered separate spheres, and global capitalism. Childrearing advice literature emerged as a distinct genre in the 1820s and 30s. This development reimagined the relationship between mothers and medical men (physicians, surgeons, apothecaries) and, in doing so, interpellated its maternal readers as ignorant, inexpert, and afraid. In confidently elevating emergent medical knowledge about childhood illness and well-baby care over the experiential wisdom of female caregivers, this genre not only contributed significantly to the development of pediatrics as a medical specialty but also participated in a sentimentalized idealization of motherhood that simultaneously elevated its symbolic importance and evacuated it of all but moral authority. Operating by rhetorically cultivating uncertainty and self-doubt in its addressees, the genre invokes an anxious reader--an anxious maternal subjectivity. This invocation operates in stochastic concert with other early and mid-nineteenth-century genres concerned with the domestic sphere and familial reproduction. While the emergence of childrearing advice literature was central to the formation of maternal anxiety, that emotion could not have become dominant if advice literature were the only genre repetitively invoking a worrying mother. I therefore expand my focus to examine a schematic ecology of genres, tracing how the narrative patternings of memoir and domestic fiction extend, reinforce, precede, reiterate, and transform those of advice literature. Serial fiction, the multiplot novel, and fictional autobiography reveal the ways in which maternal anxiety is proleptic--experiencing future possibility in the present moment--and paraliptic--invoking alternatives by denying their relevance or force. Childrearing advice literature takes up these logics but also repatterns them through the forms of the prescription and warning. Narrating lived experience for public consumption, published memoir not only individualizes this felt sense of danger but also authenticates it, lending it the force of an affective-social fact. Focusing on the three genres together allows us to see the contours and operations of this rhetorical emotion more clearly, mapping its temporal and spatial logics and ultimately its contribution to the felt experience of fragility that helped underwrite, justify, and maintain British colonial expansion. Details ISBN081421469X Author Dara Rossman Regaignon Short Title Writing Maternity Publisher Ohio State University Press Language English Year 2021 ISBN-10 081421469X ISBN-13 9780814214695 Format Hardcover Publication Date 2021-04-15 Subtitle Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre Imprint Ohio State University Press Pages 204 UK Release Date 2021-04-15 Place of Publication Columbus, OH Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2021-04-15 NZ Release Date 2021-04-15 US Release Date 2021-04-15 Edition Description First Edition, First Edition, Original Monograph ed. 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