Conceived in Modernism The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control

by Wilson, Aimee Armande

• ISBN13: 9781501307133
• ISBN10: 1501307134
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-12-17
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Aimee Armande Wilson is an Instructor in the English Department at Florida State University, USA, where she specializes in 20th-century literature and feminist theory.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Modernism, Monsters, and Margaret Sanger
Chapter 2: “God spoke with me to-day”: Prophecy, Birth Control, and The Waste Land
Chapter 3: “Sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied”: Reproduction and the Modernist Aesthetic
Chapter 4: Southern Mother, Lethal Fetus; Or How Birth Control Makes a Modernist Out of Flannery O'Connor
Chapter 5: Where Alien Abduction Meets Family Planning: Personhood, Race and Reproduction in Octavia Butler's Dawn
Coda
Bibliography
Index