Pregnancy in Literature and Film

This exploration of the ways in which pregnancy affects narrative begins with two canonical American texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne''s The Scarlet Letter (1848) and Harriet Jacobs''s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Relying on such diverse works as Frankenstein, Peyton Place, Beloved, and I Love Lucy, the book chronicles how pregnancy evolves from a conventional plot device into a matu...