This feminist-materialist study contributes towards a critique of the modern nuclear family in Western Europe by looking back at its cultural constructions and negotiations in early modern England. Connecting the traces of the past to the politics of today, the book offers further bricks to the building of a cultural history of the meanings and practices of family life in their continuity as well as discontinuity. The family is here defined as a discursive field that provides the framework for the analysis of the following interrelated concepts and categories, each being itself constituted by an ensemble of discourses: subjectivity, sex, gender, sexuality, love, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood and childhood, the public and the private, and the nation. While participating in postmodernity's deconstruction of these narratives, the author also dialectically links them to the non-discursive or material reality at the time of their initial production; i.e., to the historical specificity of the socio- economic and political fabric, in particular to the rise of possessive individualism, capitalism and the nation-state.

Manuela S. Rossini, Dr.: M.A. in English and Spanish Philology(Basel), M.A. in Critical and Cultural Theory (Cardiff), Ph.D. in 2002 (Basel),co-editor of the Rodopi book series Experimental Practices, scientific researcher at thetd-net for Transdisciplinary Research of the Swiss Academies of Arts andSciences.