Conceived in Modernism

Current debates about birth control can be surprisingly volatile, especially given the near-universal use of contraception among American and British women. Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control offers a new perspective on these debates by demonstrating that the political positions surrounding birth control have roots in literary concerns, specifically those of modernist writers. Whereas most scholarship treats modernism and birth control activism as parallel, but ultimately separate, movements, Conceived in Modernism shows that they were deeply intertwined. This book argues not only that literary concerns exerted a lasting influence on the way activists framed the emerging politics of contraception, but that birth control activism helped shape some of modernism’s most innovative concepts. By revealing the presence of literary aesthetics in the discourse surrounding birth control, Conceived in Modernism helps us see this discourse as a variable facet rather than a permanent bulwark of reproductive rights debates.

Fiction is a rich ground for considering the questions of birth control and abortion ... [Wilson] make[s] intriguing connections across countries and periods., [D]ensely packed with meticulous academic argument … The book expanded my idea of modernism to include that earlier literature and its very different concerns … That Wilson resurrects these stories is significant. And where scholars have previously seen the birth-control movement as arising in parallel with modernism, Wilson has found revealing intersections., Wilson perceptively connects literary form and political discourse, birth control's rhetorical past with debates in contemporary reproductive rights, making provocative connections between the advent of the contraceptive era and the stylistic revolutions of literary modernism that transform the reader's understanding of both movements. Spanning twentieth century authors from T.S. Eliot to Octavia Butler, Wilson's astute analysis highlights the inescapable interplay between political discourse and literary form, solidifying the place of the birth control movement as a transformative moment in western culture and her own role as a significant new voice in modernist literary criticism., Conceived in Modernism sheds new light on the relation between Anglo-American modernist aesthetics and the early birth control movement. It intervenes forcefully in debates about modernist sexualities and the history of birth control and reproduction. Aimee Armande Wilson’s politically informed and theoretically sophisticated readings of a range of canonical and lesser-known literary authors and birth control activists are illuminating and inspiring. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book makes an important and timely contribution to the intersecting inquiries of modernist studies, the history of sexuality, feminist criticism and sexuality studies.

Aimee Armande Wilson is Assistant Professor of Humanities at University of Kansas, USA, where she specializes in 20th-century literature and feminist theory.