Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola

A feminist analysis that combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France, this book focuses on three major thinkers—Rousseau, Constant and Stendhal—and includes a broad reading of the nineteenth-century novel within the frame of pathological generation. In the collision of the nascent ideology of motherhood with modes of discourse that invade and colonize the maternal body, Professor Mossman...