Chapter 4 moves from eating to feeding, returning to Nightwood and juxtaposing it with Olive Moore’s novel Spleen in order to reveal the ethics of care and control that are developed in each book. Feeding, in both novels, is a way of nurturing that is also a mode of control. In Spleen, a woman rejects the normative pleasures of marriage and motherhood, refusing to feed her child. While this might seem like a valorization of queer negativity in the form of the literal rejection of the child, the chapter reads the novel instead as one that values queer potentiality by refusing the coercive pleasures of nurture. Turning back to Nightwood, it discusses a metaphorical hunger, arguing that Barnes draws on the figure of the mother feeding her child to demonstrate how care may be coercive even in a relationship between adults.

In the surrealist revolt against the state, the Church, and the family, the mother figure became a key target, both as custodian of bourgeois-patriarchal values and as symbol of Catholic doctrine. In works such as Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928), Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s L’age d’or (1930), and Joyce Mansour’s Jules César (1955), mothers are attacked and violated, suffering a fate similar to those of the detested mother figures in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade. Yet not all mothers in surrealist art and literature are portrayed in such unequivocally negative terms. Focusing on Leonor Fini’s Mourmour, conte pour enfants velus (1976) and Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend (2004), this chapter traces an alternative history of surrealist representations of the mother, one in which this figure is rendered more ambiguous and at times even invested with revolutionary potential. These novels, the chapter suggests, elaborate representations of maternity in critical dialogue with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. As such they resonate to some extent with the (largely contemporaneous) work of French feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, in which the concept of maternity becomes configured as an alternative to the phallocentric symbolic order.

This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

This chapter discusses the management of obstetric patients undergoing anaesthesia and surgery. First, it outlines the distinct challenges of emergency obstetric anaesthesia and surgery. Second, it discusses pregnancy related changes to anatomy and physiology, common obstetric procedures, and drugs specific to the obstetric speciality. Finally, it highlights the advancements in care and medical technology and draws upon some of the moral and legal dilemmas faced by multidisciplinary teams in the obstetric setting.

This essay formulates a critical response to scholars’ Freudian-Lacanian understanding of Ovidian desire in terms of frustration, futility, absence and lack. It focuses on the Remedia Amoris, a poem it takes as paradigmatic and culminatory in Ovid’s elegiac project, and attempts to give an account of what is meaningful and productive about the rhythmic process of Ovidian amor in and of itself, through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent book on jouissance (Coming, 2017). The Remedia, it argues, performs absence not as tragic loss but as an undoing-remaking that continually regenerates desire and teaches investment in the pleasure of process. The second half of the essay explores how the poem’s temporal instabilities and dislocated subject positions produce a series of imagined inter-relations and ‘elsewheres’ that move readers away from Lacanian desire as continually projected into an ungraspable future, and into the experience of jouissance in the elegiac present.

Chapter Two is the first of four chapters on Athenian drama, and it takes as its focal point Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. In this chapter, I observe that the representation of the maiden Io as a wild and erratic dancer engages with images of female choreia and the precarious position of the outstanding maiden soloist that originate in Archaic poetry but develop a special force within Athenian tragedy. Building on arguments developed in Chapter One, I explore how the image of the maiden chorus creates space for the female soloist to relate positively to her choral group, and then demonstrate that Io disrupts that paradigm by appearing utterly unmoored from any sense of chorality. I argue that Io embodies the play’s vision of mortal life and offers an image of resistance to the authority of Zeus distinct from the static suffering of Prometheus himself – a resistance that is grounded in the twin forces of mobility and maternity.

Public policies are important in promoting gender equality. Family policies, parental leave and formal childcare provisions may help support the female labour supply, while gender quotas may be useful in reducing the glass ceiling. Other provisions in the labour market, such as flexible work arrangements and new forms of job flexibility, have also proved to play a relevant role. This chapter explores how these policies are effective in addressing gender gaps. The chapter concentrates on the relationship between public policy and gender equality, taking into account how difficult it is to identify the effects of the presence of public policy and its impact on gender equality. The chapter starts from family policy and then moves to taxation, to measures in the labour market and finally pensions.

“Edith Wharton and Transnationalism” traces the intersecting themes of gender, exile, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism in Wharton’s postwar novels. The essay proposes that distinctions between cosmopolitanism (characterized by wealth, voluntary mobility across national boundaries, and personal autonomy) and transnationalism (characterized by economic precarity, involuntary mobility, and alienated workers) break along gender lines. In the postwar novels, vulnerable agents, typically young women, try to establish a secure base for themselves despite lacking either economic capital (in The Reef and Glimpses of the Moon) or a social cachet lost through their actions (The Mother’s Recompense, Hudson River Bracketed, The Gods Arrive), in both cases experiencing a rootless existence at odds with the travel among countries and cultures in which their male counterparts engage. Wharton’s signposts of transnationalism, among them a focus on transportation and movement, mechanically mediated communications, economic exchanges for social benefits, and adoptive motherhood figure within these novels as a means of illustrating not so much the value of rootedness as the effects of modernity in erasing it as a possibility for transnational women.