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Resistant Reproductions asks why narratives of pregnancy and abortion emerged in the early twentieth century and what kinds of stories these narratives conveyed. Is it only once pregnancy becomes plannable that it becomes a story worth telling? Abortion is often considered resistant and feminist, while pregnancy is considered domestic and conventional. How can readings of literary narratives challenge this reductive binary?
Resistant Reproductions, the first book-length study of both pregnancy and abortion in British culture, addresses these questions by examining pregnancy narratives, including abortion narratives, in British fiction and film from 1907 to 1967. Fiction became a way for writers to explore what new possibilities of reproductive control would mean for the individual, yet there was also much anxiety about who would have control: individuals or the state. While exploring intimate personal experiences of pregnancy and abortion, Resistant Reproductions also asks how literary narratives used reproductive plots to address political issues of gender, class, and eugenics.
List of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Pregnancy as Protest: Speculative Fiction by WWI and Interwar Women Writers Beyond Brave New World
Chapter 2. Blood and Pain and Ugliness: Abortion in the 1930s Writings of Naomi Mitchison
Chapter 3. The Shattered Mould: Rosamond Lehmann and Abortion in 1930s Rhetoric and Fiction
Chapter 4. A Bit of Himself: Male-Authored Abortion Narratives from Waste to Alfie
Chapter 5. Bubble Baths for Brenda: Pregnancy and Abortion in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and 'Angry Young Man' narratives in Mid-Century British Novels and Film
Chapter 6. Babies without Husbands: Unmarried Pregnancy in 1960s British Fiction
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Fran Bigman is an independent academic who lives in New York City. She received her PhD and MPhil in English from the University of Cambridge and her BA in History from Brown University.
Summary
This book challenges the association of abortion with the radical and pregnancy with the conventional by exploring the reproductive politics of British literature and film from 1907 when abortion was first used as a critical plot point in literature to 1967 when abortion law was liberalized in England, Scotland, and Wales.
