Writing British Infanticide tracks the ways that the circulation of narratives of child-murder in eighteenth- and nineteenth century Britain shaped perceptions and punishments of the crime and, more elusively, hierarchies of class and gender. The essays brought together in this volume pose the question: How are we to understand the proliferation of writing about child-murder in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the overlap of an expanding print culture with the widely evident narration of this particular crime? Further, what are we to make of the recurrent and remarkably consistent representation of child-murder as the special province of unmarried, desparate women? Focussing on specific instances of the transformative effect of the circulation of narratives of child-murder, 'Writing British Infanticide' takes as its purview not child-murder per se but the ways that writing about its credentialed and differentiated writers in different, but often overlapping, genres and moments in a key period in the expansion of print. Jennifer Thorn is an Assistant Professor of English at Duke University.

Maternal infanticide, or the murder of a child in its first year of life by its mother, elicits sorrow, anger, horror, and outrage. But the perpetrator is often a victim, too. The editor of this revealing work asks us to reach beyond rage, stretch the limits of compassion, and enter the minds of mothers who kill their babies -- with the hope that advancing the knowledge base and stimulating inquiry in this neglected area of maternal-infant research will save young lives. Written to help remedy today's dearth of up-to-date, research-based literature, this unique volume brings together a multidisciplinary group of 17 experts -- scholars, clinicians, researchers, clinical and forensic psychiatrists, pediatric psychoanalysts, attorneys, and an epidemiologist -- who focus on the psychiatric perspective of this tragic cause of infant death. This comprehensive, practical work is organized into four parts for easy reference: Part I presents historical and epidemiological data, including a compelling discussion of the contrasting legal views of infanticide in the United States, United Kingdom, and other Western countries, a review of the latest statistics on maternal infanticide, and a discussion of the problems of underreporting and the lack of available documentation. Part II covers the psychiatric, psychological, cultural, and biological underpinnings of infanticide, detailing how to identify, evaluate, and treat postpartum psychiatric disorders. The authors explore clinical diagnosis, symptom recognition, risk factors, biological precipitants, and alternative motives, such as cultural infanticide. Chapter 3, developed to assist the attorney or mental health professional in understanding the implications of postpartum psychiatric illness as they relate to infanticide, presents a sensitive and thorough inquiry into infanticidal ideation. Part III focuses on contemporary legislation, criminal defenses, and disparate treatment in U.S. law and compares U.S. law with the U.K.'s model of probation and treatment. Chapter 8 is an especially useful resource for the attorney or expert psychiatric witness preparing for an infanticide/neonaticide case in the criminal court system. Part IV discusses clinical experience with mothers as perpetrators and countertransference in therapy, the range of mother-infant interactions (from healthy to pathological), and methods of early intervention and prevention. This balanced perspective on a highly emotional issue will find a wide audience among psychiatric and medical professionals (child, clinical, and forensic psychiatrists and psychologists; social workers; obstetricians/gynecologists and midwives; nurses; and pediatricians), legal professionals (judges, attorneys, law students), public health professionals, and interested laypersons.

In the eighteenth century, audiences in Great Britain understood the term ’slavery’ to refer to a range of physical and metaphysical conditions beyond the transatlantic slave trade. Literary representations of slavery encompassed tales of Barbary captivity, the ’exotic’ slaving practices of the Ottoman Empire, the political enslavement practiced by government or church, and even the harsh life of servants under a cruel master. Arguing that literary and cultural studies have focused too narrowly on slavery as a term that refers almost exclusively to the race-based chattel enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans transported to the New World, the contributors suggest that these analyses foreclose deeper discussion of other associations of the term. They suggest that the term slavery became a powerful rhetorical device for helping British audiences gain a new perspective on their own position with respect to their government and the global sphere. Far from eliding the real and important differences between slave systems operating in the Atlantic world, this collection is a starting point for understanding how slavery as a concept came to encompass many forms of unfree labor and metaphorical bondage precisely because of the power of association.

In the first detailed study of its kind, James Gregory's book takes a historical approach to mercy by focusing on widespread and varied discussions about the quality, virtue or feeling of mercy in the British world during Victoria's reign. Gregory covers an impressive range of themes from the gendered discourses of 'emotional' appeal surrounding Queen Victoria to the exercise and withholding of royal mercy in the wake of colonial rebellion throughout the British empire. Against the backdrop of major events and their historical significance, a masterful synthesis of rich source material is analysed, including visual depictions (paintings and cartoons in periodicals and popular literature) and literary ones (in sermons, novels, plays and poetry). Gregory's sophisticated analysis of the multiple meanings, uses and operations of royal mercy duly emphasise its significance as a major theme in British cultural history during the 'long 19th century'. This will be essential reading for those interested in the history of mercy, the history of gender, British social and cultural history and the legacy of Queen Victoria's reign.

Addressing major historical issues relating to crime, gender and medicine, New-Born Child Murder looks at the women who were accused of murdering their new-born children in the 18th century.

Arguing for the centrality of the female criminal subject to the rise of the British novel, Kirsten Saxton compares representations of homicidal women in legal documents with those in the early novels of Behn, Manley, Defoe, and Fielding. She demonstrates that legal narratives informed the novel's evolution and fictional texts shaped the development of legal narratives, and suggests that Augustan configurations of the murderess continue to influence our legal and social conceptions of femininity.

In the eighteenth century, when the definition of marriage was shifting from one based on an hierarchical model to one based on notions of love and mutuality, marital life came under a more intense cultural scrutiny. This led to paradoxical forms of representation of marriage as simultaneously ideal and unlivable. Chris Roulston analyzes how, as representations of married life increased, they challenged the traditional courtship model, offering narratives based on repetition rather than progression. Beginning with English and French marital advice literature, which appropriated novelistic conventions at the same time that it cautioned readers about the dangers of novel reading, she looks at representations of ideal marriages in Pamela II and The New Heloise. Moving on from these ideal domestic spaces, bourgeois marriage is then problematized by the discourse of empire in Sir George Ellison and Letters of Mistress Henley, by troublesome wives in works by Richardson and Samuel de Constant, and by abusive husbands in works by Haywood, Edgeworth, Genlis and Restif de la Bretonne. Finally, the alternative marriage narrative, in which the adultery motif is incorporated into the marriage itself, redefines the function of heteronormativity. In exploring the theoretical issues that arise during this transitional period for married life and the marriage plot, Roulston expands the debates around the evolution of the modern couple.