Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts focuses on mothers as subjects and as writers who produce auto/biography, fiction, and poetry about maternity. International contributors examine the mother without child, with child, and in her multiple identities as grandmother, mother, and daughter.
The collection examines how authors use textual spaces to accept, negotiate, resist, or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering and maternal roles, and how these texts offer alternative practices and visions for mothers. Further, it illuminates how textual representations both reflect and help to define or (re)shape the realities of women and families by examining how mothering and being a mother are political, personal, and creative narratives unfolding within both the pages of a book and the spaces of a life. The range of chapters maps a shift from the daughter-centric stories that have dominated the maternal tradition to the matrilineal and matrifocal perspectives that have emerged over the last few decades as the mother’s voice moved from silence to speech.
Contributors make aesthetic, cultural, and political claims and critiques about mothering and motherhood, illuminating in new and diverse ways how authors and the protagonists of the texts “read” their own maternal identities as well as the maternal scripts of their families, cultures, and nations in their quest for self-knowledge, agency, and artistic expression.
- Bibliography, etc. Note
- Includes bibliographical references and index
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- 820.9/35252
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 22
- General Note
- Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- Geographic Area Code
- n-cn---
- ISBN
- 9781554581801 9781554582921
- LCCN
- PR9192.6.M64
- LCCN Item number
- T45 2010eb
- Modifying agency
- CaBNVSL
- Original cataloging agency
- CaOONL
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (xi, 387 p.)
- Published in
- Canada
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)slc00224616 (OCoLC)649833629 (CaOOCEL)433541
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- CaOONL
Table of Contents
- Contents 6
- Acknowledgements 10
- Introduction: Maternal Literatures in Text and Tradition: Daughter-Centric, Matrilineal, and Matrifocal Perspectives 14
- Part 1: Maternal Absence 42
- 1. Aberrant, Absent, Alienated: Reading the Maternal in Jane Urquhart’s First Two Novels, The Whirlpool and Changing Heaven 44
- 2. Motherless Daughters: The Absent Mothers in Margaret Atwood 60
- 3. Writing about Abusive Mothers: Ethics and Auto/biography 76
- 4. “Red Mother”: The Missing Mother Plot as Double Mystery in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction 92
- 5. “This was her punishment”: Jew, Whore, Mother in the Fiction of Adele Wiseman and Lilian Nattel 108
- Part 2: Maternal Ambivalence 122
- 6. Eden Robinson’s “Dogs in Winter”: Parodic Extremes of Mothering 124
- 7. Subverting the Saintly Mother: The Novels of Gabrielle Poulin 138
- 8. “Opaque with confusion and shame”: Maternal Ambivalence in Rita Dove’s Poetry 154
- 9. Maternal Blitz: Harriet Lovatt as Postpartum Sufferer in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child 170
- 10. We Need to Talk about Gender: Mothering and Masculinity in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin 182
- Part 3: Maternal Agency 198
- 11. Narrating Maternal Subjectivity: Memoirs from Motherhood 200
- 12. The Motherhood Memoir and the “New Momism”: Biting the Hand That Feeds You 216
- 13. “I had to make a future, willful, voluble, lascivious”: Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Disruptive Lesbian Maternal Narratives 228
- 14. Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature 240
- 15. But She’s a Mom! Sex, Motherhood, and the Poetry of Sharon Olds 254
- 16. (Grand)mothering “Children of the Apocalypse”: A Post-postmodern Ecopoetic Reading of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners 266
- Part 4: Maternal Communication 284
- 17. Colonialism’s Impact on Mothering: Jamaica Kincaid’s Rendering of the Mother–Daughter Split in Annie John 286
- 18. Mother to Daughter: Muted Maternal Feminism in the Fiction of Sandra Cisneros 300
- 19. Cracking (Mother) India 316
- 20. Asian American Mothering in the Absence of Talk Story: Obasan and Chorus of Mushrooms 330
- 21. Baby, Boo-Boo, and Bobs: The Matrilineal Auto/biographies of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, and Eleanor Lanahan 346
- 22. Revelations and Representations: Birth Stories and Motherhood on the Internet 364
- Coda: “Stories to Live By”: Maternal Literatures and Motherhood Studies 380
- Notes on the Contributors 388
- Index 392
- A 392
- B 392
- C 393
- D 393
- E 394
- F 394
- G 395
- H 395
- I 396
- J 396
- K 396
- L 396
- M 397
- N 398
- O 398
- P 398
- Q 398
- R 398
- S 399
- T 399
- U 399
- V 399
- W 399
- Y 400
