Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Home Nature Amp the Feminine Idecb: Geographies of the Interior and of Empire

Take three things: the home, nature, and the feminine ideal-a notional and perfected femininity. Constitute them as inexorably and universally connected. Enrol them in diverse strategies and tactics that create varied anatomo-politics of the body and biopolitics of the population. Enlist those three things as the "handmaidens" of the government of individuals and groups, places and spaces, and comings and goings. Focus some effort on the periodical press, and on producing and disseminating narratives, discourses, and practices that relate specifically to health and well-being. Deploy those texts and shape those contexts in ways that affect flesh and bone, psychology and social conduct, and the spatial organization and relational dynamics of dwellings and streets, settlements and regions, and states and empires. Stretch these activities over the Anglophone world-from the epicentres of the United Kingdom and the United States to Australia or Canada, New Zealand or India-and extend their reach over the whole of the long nineteenth century. Such are the subjects of this work, in which Elaine Stratford draws from governmentality, the geohumanities, and geocriticism to converse with an extensive archive that profoundly shaped our engagements with home, nature, and the feminine ideal, deeply influenced our collective capacity to flourish, and powerfully constituted diverse geographies of the interior and of empire that still affect us. Review Engaging with an impressively interdisciplinary body of knowledge, Stratford seems to be as comfortable with history as she is with geography, philosophy, or literature... It takes great skill to weave together and maintain a sense of cohesion within a book that traverses more than a century of time, three far-flung countries, and the diverse themes of beauty, childhood, education, fashion, fertility, fitness, health, housing, menstruation, migration, motherhood, racism, sex, and more. Stratford displays her scholarly dexterity and sophistication in managing to create a compelling central narrative amidst this heterogeneity and complexity... Academics are often exhorted to be 'interdisciplinary' these days, although sometimes this term is invoked in a rather token fashion. In these pages, Stratford manages to genuinely straddle and bridge multiple disciplines. She commences her introduction with a cartographic metaphor, and indeed the ensuing pages navigate many disciplinary fields... I am confident that this book will have broad appeal to scholars and students working across these disciplines and beyond.-- "Geographical Research" Stratford argues that the body is not simply a backdrop to political events and ideas; it is a crucial site where norms of culture and gender and even empire are made and remade. Home, Nature, and the Feminine Ideal is a superb book that is avowedly geographical in its Foucauldian exploration of gendered social norms and the relationship between bodies and territories.-- "AAG Review of Books" Stratford's efforts in this book are valuable and thoughtprovoking.The strongest element of the work is the impressive depth, breadth, and mastery of the archival research Stratford has engaged in, and her ability to animate these voices from history to illuminate how the themes of home, nature, and the feminine ideal were embedded in spatial constructions. This is a monograph worthy of consideration by scholars and graduate students in the field of historical, feminist, and critical geography, as well as for those interested in the construction of nature, environmentalism, public health, and discourses of governmentality. While it leaves some explanation to be desired at times, this book provokes deep thought and brings together a wide range of scholarship within history and geography.--Carolyn Thompson, Southern Connecticut State University "Journal of Historical Geography" In Home, Nature, and the Feminine Ideal Elaine Stratford presents a lucid and