ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on less canonical work, it addresses one of the most powerful images in the Western tradition, the infant at the mother's breast. The book deals with ideological, aesthetic, and philosophical treatments of the infant and child. It focuses with issues of the infant's body. It does so through a reading of the work of Sara Coleridge. Diagnosed with a nervous disorder-the nineteenth-century name was puerperal insanity-Coleridge. The book exposes a common thread that runs through Shelley's poetry and poetics: namely, a sense of interconnectedness that Shelley suggests happens even at the molecular level. It sees Tennyson working through his anxiety about poetic circulation, an anxiety that corresponds to a deep and over-determined melancholia, a relation to loss that culminates with the stillbirth of his first son. The book tells one version of the story of how the idea of infancy was born.
