Online Talk! Livia Arndal Woods Discusses Pregnancy in British Literature

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Livia Arndal Woods will discuss her recent book, Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel, which argues that we need to be attuned to speculation and our own experiences of embodiment to read depictions of women’s reproductive capacity in nineteenth-century British literature as anything other than punishment. Victorian novels tend to avoid the direct representation of pregnancy except in cases of maternal immorality or immodesty. Without active resistance, we inherit and repeat pregnancy plots in which reproductive bodies are always already guilty.

Dr. Livia Arndal Woods (she/her/hers) earned a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center and is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Her research focuses on British Victorian literature and culture, women’s and gender studies, and the medical humanities.

📷 Illustration of a pregnant woman, with her abdomen sectioned to show the foetus, during the first (left), second (centre) and third (right) trimesters (top) and Illustration of a pregnant woman in repose (bottom). From An Improved System of Midwifery, by Wooster Beach (1794-1868), published in 1851.