Love, wind eggs, and mere conceptions: non-generation in William Harvey's De conceptione. Issue 8 (14th September 2019)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- Love, wind eggs, and mere conceptions: non-generation in William Harvey's De conceptione. Issue 8 (14th September 2019)
- Main Title:
- Love, wind eggs, and mere conceptions: non-generation in William Harvey's De conceptione
- Authors:
- Davis, Isabel
- Abstract:
- ABSTRACT: This essay offers a new reading of William Harvey's De conceptione, considering for the first time its interest in non-generative conception. Further, it considers the way that Harvey entangles observations about erotic and maternal love in his discussions of the conceiving body. Love provides a context which Harvey reads for information about conception. But, for Harvey, conception and generation are not synonymous. Conceptions can be without as well as with a foetus, and Harvey is at least as interested in non-generation as he is in generation, and false pregnancy as pregnancy. Harvey's notion of an immaterial or 'mere' conception, on which he builds an intricate analogy about the relation of uterus and brain, is designed to accommodate un-reproductive as well as reproductive experience. Reading signs of love – desires, devotions, intimacies – gives Harvey a way of distinguishing between different kinds of reproductive non-events, health and pathology. He offers an extended consideration of wind eggs and uses fictions of the wind to credit the loves of those that produce no offspring as nonetheless creatively conceiving and biologically demonstrative.
- Is Part Of:
- Textual practice. Volume 33:Issue 8(2019)
- Journal:
- Textual practice
- Issue:
- Volume 33:Issue 8(2019)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 33, Issue 8 (2019)
- Year:
- 2019
- Volume:
- 33
- Issue:
- 8
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2019-0033-0008-0000
- Page Start:
- 1321
- Page End:
- 1340
- Publication Date:
- 2019-09-14
- Subjects:
- William Harvey -- false pregnancy -- conception -- uterus -- wind eggs -- psychophysiology
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals
Criticism -- Periodicals
Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals
Semiotics -- Periodicals
801.95 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtpr20/current ↗
http://www.tandfonline.com/ ↗
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0950236X.asp ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1080/0950236X.2019.1648100 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 0950-236X
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - 8813.780460
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 14575.xml