Bearing Liminality, Laboring White Ink

Francisco José Cortés Vieco is Associate Professor at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) in Spain, where he lectures on English Literature and Gender Studies. He holds a PhD in Gender Studies (University of Alcalá) and a PhD in Literary Studies (UCM), both recognized with outstanding thesis awards. Thanks to a postdoctoral scholarship, he was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University in 2018. His principal research interest is women’s literature in English-speaking countries, with an emphasis on the female body, sexual violence, maternity and nervous disorders, and on approaches from medical humanities, French feminism, and trauma studies. He is the author of almost forty publications, including peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, critical editions and translations of Victorian poetry into the Spanish language, and a monograph on sexuality and suicide in women’s literature (Alcalá, 2016).

«In this fascinating and wide-ranging book, Francisco José Cortés Vieco seeks to restore the centrality and even intelligibility of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in classic works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American female writers that he argues structures of patriarchy have denied them. Sparkling with insights and a pleasure to read.»(Professor Elizabeth Lunbeck, Harvard University) «This is a historically wide-ranging account of the tropes of pregnancy and childbirth in women’s literature. Cortés Vieco’s learned study combines theoretical expertise and thorough, insightful close readings to revisit the connections between women’s creativity and procreativity, while resisting essentialist equations of maternity and womanhood.»(Dr Karin Koehler, Bangor University, UK)

• CONTENTS: The Pregnant/ Birthing Body and Mind of White Ink and Liminality – The Nineteenth- Century Threshold for Inkless Liminal Women: Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Mary Anne Evans/ George Eliot – Modern(ist) Liminality for the (Pro)creative Body and Mind: Edith Wharton, Meridel Le Sueur, Jean Rhys, and Anaïs Nin – Toward a Contemporary Unity between Creativity and Procreativity: Margaret Drabble, Elizabeth Baines, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Ilona Karmel, and Cherríe Moraga – Progression to (In)conclusion, Regression to Margaret Atwood.