Child Murder and British Culture, 17201900

Child Murder and British Culture, 17201900 by Josephine Mcdonagh

In this wide-ranging study, Josephine McDonagh examines the idea of child murder in British culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Analysing texts drawn from economics, philosophy, law, medicine as well as from literature, McDonagh highlights the manifold ways in which child murder echoes and reverberates in a variety of cultural debates and social practices. She places literary works within social, political and cultural contexts, including debates on luxury, penal reform campaigns, slavery, the treatment of the poor, and birth control. She traces a trajectory from Swift's A Modest Proposal through to the debates on the New Woman at the turn of the twentieth century by way of Burke, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, George Egerton, and Thomas Hardy, among others. McDonagh demonstrates the haunting persistence of the notion of child murder within British culture in a volume that will be of interest to cultural and literary scholars alike.

'… in-depth study' The Times Higher Education Supplement
'There is much here for the literary scholar and the historian, as the book situates an emotive theme within a wide-ranging cultural framework.' BARS Bulletin

Josephine McDonagh is Reader in Romantic and Victorian Culture in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of De Quincey's Disciplines (1994) and George Eliot (1997) and co-editor of Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2001).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521054560
ISBN 10	0521054567
Title	Child Murder and British Culture, 17201900
Author	Josephine Mcdonagh
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2008-01-21
Number of pages	296
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.