ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the scope, approach and structure of the book.
Scope—Spaces of maternity in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the history and theory underpinning their cultures.
Approach—A combinatory practice of creative and critical spatial history writing. The book positions architecture as a spatial discourse composed simultaneously of histories and theories of buildings, their typologies and designs, the buildings themselves, and the social practices that intersect them. The writing experiments with a new style: as an ensemble of discourses, of mobile and fluid languages, composed of a number of moments and ideas, tactics and theories, held together and probed through a form of creative-critical writing into which the reader is propelled as an interlocutor.
Structure—An ‘Ensemble’ chapter that details the ways of working as simultaneous flows with the productions of knowledge, argument, creativity and critique. The Ensemble chapter is followed by four main chapters on the history of spaces of maternity: 1. The dark and airless room; 2. The man-midwife enters; 3. Building hospitals, building bodies: the hospital for lying-in; 4. Commonplaces—species of maternal spaces. Each of these is composed of a number of shorter parts that move between material and literary analyses of the buildings, spaces and objects and between theory, history and subjective, autofictional voices.
