"Reproduction Without Bodies, Bodies Without Reproduction" is a transhistorical issue that moves chronologically from 1500 to 1900 but resists the impulse to suggest any single story about reproduction and bodies from early modernity to the end of the nineteenth century. Rather, we argue that nonreproductive bodies and nonbodily reproduction are always importantly interrelated in ways that can shift in time, place, and context. In recognizing the limits and violent legacies of reproductive futurity, this themed issue features ongoing analyses of reproductive refusal as well as of organizing attunements to patriarchal reproductive powers, race and racialization, medicalization and embodiment, and anti-feminism. Bodily, reproductive, political, and disciplinary precarities frame our interest in both "reproduction" and "body" as pressing and mutable categories.
In this article, I discuss Margaret Cavendish's consideration of reproduction and birth across several texts, then focus on her imaginative vision for reproduction outside of the maternal body in her science fiction. In The Blazing World (1666), a material gum allows an aged body to be wholly rejuvenated, while in Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1656), fleshy beds offer external wombs for the same purpose, both over the course of nine months. Examples of similar reproduction abound in science fiction today, and as a progenitor of the genre, we find many such examples across Cavendish's science fictional writings.
This essay argues that early modern English tragedies frequently understood the primary political crisis through what we call an "abortive poetics of tragedy." This pervasive trope relied upon actual abortions, abortive metaphors, procreative refusals or regrets, and socially unacceptable births that signal an antisocial strain within the population that threatens its re-productive future. The characters embodying antisociality often experience literal, potential, or metaphorical abortions through the catharsis of the tragedy's bloody end. From Isabella's grief-driven maternal regret in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy specialIntscript to Annabella's death and terminated pregnancy at the end of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore specialIntscript to Lady Macbeth's infamous refusal of maternal care in Shakespeare's Macbeth specialIntscript we illustrate how abortive poetics were a central and even structural component of early modern tragedies. By way of conclusion, we point to the urgency of attending to the wide-ranging definitions of "abortions" in the past, present, and future. In the context of the current politicization of women's healthcare in the United States, we urge that attending to the slipperiness of the "abor-tive," as a political, medical, and even (to some degree) fictional category, will open the door to a more robust and humane dis-course around abortion care.
This essay investigates botanical metaphors in poetic depictions of the nonreproductive female body. Though the nineteenth century dawned in the era of Malthusian angst about overpopulation, by midcentury the figure of the childless woman had become a source of anxiety, implicated in panic about "redundant" women and declining birth rates. In what ways does Victorian poetry register changing figurations of fruitlessness? I explore Victorian poems-especially poems by women-that resist the reproductive imperative even as they attend specifically to the sexual potential of the flower. I begin by surveying midcentury poems about "useless" flowers, focusing on poppies, before turning to queer botanical figures in the aestheticist poetry of A. Mary F. Robinson and Michael Field. In attending to the temporality of the flower itself-resisting the pull toward the future signaled by fruit and seed-these poets offer a queer, autoerotic repurposing of botanical imagery that decouples sexuality from reproductivity.
This inaugural installment of "SEL: The Exchange" brings together Susan Fraiman (University of Virginia) and Gayle Salamon (Princeton University) in a wide-ranging conversation on gender, sexuality, domesticity, and cultural critique. Beginning with the recent television series Adolescence (2025), the exchange explores masculinity "in full collapse," the family as an alternative to courtroom drama, and the gendered resonances of physical acts such as throwing and walking. From there, Fraiman and Salamon turn to questions of feminist comportment, consciousness-raising, and the persistent divide between equality and difference feminism. Their discussion engages phenomenology, queer and trans theory, and the history of feminist debates, while also drawing on film, nineteenth-century fiction, and memoirs of eldercare. Throughout, they examine how gender and sexuality are co-constitutive categories, how domestic labor embodies creative intelligence, and how trans and feminist discourses need one another in fraught times. The result is a vibrant dialogue that models intellectual generosity and shows the continuing urgency of feminist and queer analysis for literature, culture, and everyday life.
This essay examines The Fortunate Transport (ca. 1750) as a palimpsest of enslaved and criminalized colonial women. Published anonymously under the signature "A Creole," the novel is narrated by a formerly enslaved woman who recounts the adventures of her mistress, Polly Haycock. Polly is "begot by Chance" because of a rape that occurs while her mother is asleep, dreaming of colonial Jamaica. Her early life is spent in sex work and theft before she is transported to the New World. I attend to the ways in which the novel experiments with the term "creole," using it to signify racial mixing, intimacies between bonded laborers, and disembodied authorial personae, and show how a strikingly synoptic picture of sexuality's critical role in imperial world-building emerges from this slipperiness.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973) prompted media outlets from The New York Times to CNN to highlight antiabortion feminists, including Erika Bachiochi, the director of a conservative feminist think tank called The Wollstonecraft Project. This article sets conservative feminism's reclamation of Wollstonecraft alongside the work of literary historians who recovered her long ago as the "mother of feminism." This body of work establishes Wollstonecraft's inability to serve as a fore-mother for antiabortion feminists. At the same time, Bachiochi's reclamation of Wollstonecraft points to the uncertain foundation Wollstonecraft's work provides for defenses of sexual freedom. The different Wollstonecrafts that emerge from this essay invite questions about the function and future of feminist recovery.
This article suggests that the dialogue between Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" and Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply" foregrounds a negotiation of ecological plenitude as a site of erotic possibility. The poems construct and destabilize a reproductive ecological formation through the initial construction of a fecund landscape in "The Passionate Shepherd," its subsequent denial in "The Nymph's Reply," and Raleigh's gendering of the Shepherd's beloved as a Nymph, despite the nonreproductive context of her reply. I call this unstable schema "pastoral drag," a model that expands raw materiality to a symbolic realm, encompassing both the unsettlement and reinstatement of gender around pastoral naturescapes. My article traces how and to what extent environmental fertility stands in for procreation, as well as the gendered implications of this formal strategy. Aiming to illuminate the poetic tools of this negotiation, my analysis ultimately sustains the broader claim that homoerotic forms of desire and nonnormative gendering can constitute generative and often crucial participants in early modern reproductive discourse.
This essay reads Lucy Hutchinson's child as one who is consistently yoked to precarity and ruin. The figure of the child in Hutchinson's work, that is, reveals and refuses the fantasy inherent in the belief that the meaning of life is located in-and guaranteed by-an endlessly proliferating and deferred future, and suggests instead that meaning is to be found in death and the endless destruction of the present. If there is futurity to be found in reproduction, it is a futurity that is born not out of the replication of existing social structures via the production of future generations but out of multiple episodes.
This essay establishes the centrality of the family form to the social reproduction of plantation slavery. Through studies of Sarah Scott's novel The History of Sir George Ellison (1766) and the writings of the Black radical abolitionist Robert Wedderburn (1817-31), I explore how the colonial family-considered as an institution dedicated to the preservation of property and the private governance of the slave estate-adapts older models of service, obligation, and domination to the requirements of remaking a captive labor force in the slave economies of the British Caribbean. I argue the sentimental novel of slavery propagates discourses of the "benevolent" plantation through fantasies of private improvement: amelioration conducted through the vocabulary of family. I read Wedderburn, with and against the grain, for early visions of family abolitionism.
This essay examines eighteenth-century cultural texts, including legal and medical documents, that discuss reproduction of people with atypical anatomy and illuminates concerns regarding (non)reproduction in the period's memoir and literature. While medical treatises on intersex individuals can be interpreted as texts that work actively against any future, as they emphasize nonreproductive function and aesthetics, I find possibility in the numerous ways queer and intersex literary characters are given moments where they anticipate their imagined futures.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) famously condemns scientists' hubris for assuming biologically creative powers. Where Shelley, rebutting Thomas Malthus's warning of unchecked population growth, suggested that men-only reproductive experiments would result in technological and moral failure, prominent late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century speculative works returned Shelley's plot into cultural circulation, among them Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Filippo-Tommaso Marinetti's Mafarka the Futurist (1909). Adding misogyny to Shelley's anti-creation myth, these texts responded to the increased visibility of women's political agitation, finding their apotheosis in Marinetti's proto-fascism. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless. His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on, and the things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle, and blunder, and suffer; at last to die painfully.
In their poetry, Thomas Hardy and William Barnes draw on familiar linguistic roots and traditional dialect terms as they coin new words-thus combining innovation and retrospection. Their neologisms elucidate two paradoxical Victorian phenomena: a historical perspective that involves both longing for and alienation from the past, and a local perspective that aligns regional identity both with and against national identity. By closely examining these writers' poetic responses to loss, this essay demonstrates that neology recalibrates the ways in which identity coheres, or fails to cohere, across time and space. Such questions, it turns out, also lie at the heart of elegy.
This article traces the provenance of the adjective Dickensian and argues that Dickens both inaugurated new words, phrases, and idioms, and also popularized many obscure ones that are part of our common lexicon today.
When, in Hyperion: A Fragment (1820), John Keats described the Titan God Hyperion as "unsecure," he was using a word that, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary, had been obsolete for nearly 100 years. The term "unsecured," in contrast, was first coined in the 1780s, initially as a way of describing debt that lacked collateral. Although almost as rare as "unsecure," the word "unsecured" surfaces in Sir Walter Scott's novels at the start of the 1820s in reference to individuals on the margins of imprisonment. This article proposes that, although obscure, these contrasting conceptualizations of insecurity nonetheless throw some light upon the growing significance of security in nineteenth-century Britain.
This essay reconstructs a cultural history of logistics through related concepts that went by other names: activities such as supply, figures such as the sutler and vivandi & egrave;re, and institutions such as the commissariat. To do so, I give sustained discussion to the sutler Mary Seacole. Widely known as a nurse, she also practiced a commercial and vernacular logistics, supplying British, French, and Turkish troops on the front lines of the Crimean War. Since the mid-twentieth century, military history and science have become ever more insular fields; yet both notoriously fail to capture war's on-the-ground realities. My unexpected choice to reframe Seacole as a logistician reveals the emergent contours of the logistical imagination in the mid-nineteenth century.
The linguistic world of nineteenth-century Anglo-India was saturated with numerous words and terms from a variety of Indian languages. One particularly resonant word was "banian" or "banyan" (contemporary transliteration, "bania"). On the western coast of India, the term referred to a community of Hindu and Jain merchants engaged as bankers, brokers, accountants, and moneylenders, upon whom Europeans relied to meet their financial and trading needs. Bania capitalism, though, was also associated with austere forms of vegetarianism and the maintenance of animal hospitals dedicated to the shelter and care of sick, injured, or nonproductive birds and animals. This essay examines the conspicuous paradoxes-unlimited hospitality to nonhuman animal life, combined with the ruthless pursuit of profit-that defined banian practice and banian calculation, including moral calculation.
The OED credits Walter Pater for the first use of "asce-sis." In transliterating from the Greek, and rejecting available etymologically related nouns including "asceticism," Pater makes " asc & ecirc;sis " crucial to his attempts to defend aestheticism against his critics. For Pater, the original Greek idea had been obfus-cated in favor of a specific set of Christian connotations. The essay historicizes Pater's neologism within contemporary literary contexts and the wider intellectual situation of late nineteenth-century culture. It argues Pater's use of " asc & ecirc;sis " was part of a wider reclamation of ancient Greek culture in the service of a queer counter-discourse. The essay concludes by addressing some later uses of the word by figures including John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis.
This essay examines the neologisms "psilology" and "psilosophy" in the light of the writings of Johann Georg Hamann and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through careful, close reading it traces the humorous and serious valences of these terms for both the authors and our contemporary moment. Hamann and Coleridge reveal the difficult and uncontrollable nature of neologisms as a concentrated case study for the power of language more generally.
Living in London during the turbulent final decade of the eighteenth century, William Blake witnessed his friend and employer, the radical bookseller Joseph Johnson, jailed for six months. Around the suspension of habeas corpus in 1794, there is a conspicuous shift in Blake's poetic discourse as he began to systematically implement an idiosyncratic mythopoeic lexicon. His neologisms, moreover, highlight a proximal radical agenda. His modification of "worshipped" into "warshipped" speaks to this preoccupation. As this article will set forth, this linguistic adaptation was both a practical response as well as a creative liberation.
