Motherhood In Literature And Culture

Author : Gill Rye
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317235479
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Motherhood in Literature and Culture written by Gill Rye and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motherhood remains a complex and contested issue in feminist research as well as public discussion. This interdisciplinary volume explores cultural representations of motherhood in various contemporary European contexts, including France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and the UK, and it considers how such representations affect the ways in which different individuals and groups negotiate motherhood as both institution and lived experience. It has a particular focus on literature, but it also includes essays that examine representations of motherhood in philosophy, art, social policy, and film. The book’s driving contention is that, through intersecting with other fields and disciplines, literature and the study of literature have an important role to play in nuancing dialogues around motherhood, by offering challenging insights and imaginative responses to complex problems and experiences. This is demonstrated throughout the volume, which covers a range of topics including: discursive and visual depictions of pregnancy and birth; the impact of new reproductive technologies on changing family configurations; the relationship between mothering and citizenship; the shaping of policy imperatives regarding mothering and disability; and the difficult realities of miscarriage, child death, violence, and infanticide. The collection expands and complicates hegemonic notions of motherhood, as the authors map and analyse shifting conceptions of maternal subjectivity and embodiment, explore some of the constraining and/or enabling contexts in which mothering takes place, and ask searching questions about what it means to be a ‘mother’ in Europe today. It will be of interest not only to those working in gender, women’s and feminist studies, but also to scholars in literary and cultural studies, and those researching in sociology, criminology, politics, psychology, medical ethics, midwifery, and related fields.

Author : Laura Lazzari
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030774074
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture written by Laura Lazzari and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture repositions motherhood studies through the lens of trauma theory by exploring new challenges surrounding conception, pregnancy, and postpartum experiences. Chapters investigate nine case studies of motherhood trauma and recovery in literature and culture from the last twenty years by exploring their emotional consequences through the lens of trauma, resilience, and “working through” theories. Contributions engage with a transnational corpus drawn from the five continents and span topics as rarely discussed as pregnancy denial, surrogacy, voluntary or involuntary childlessness, racism and motherhood, carceral mothering practices, surrogacy, IVF, artificial wombs, and mothering through war, genocide, and migration. Accompanied by an online creative supplement, this volume deals with silenced aspects of embodied motherhood while enhancing a better understanding of the cathartic effects of storytelling.

Author : Sheila Heti
Publisher : Henry Holt and Company
ISBN 13 : 1627790780
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Motherhood written by Sheila Heti and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”—Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home. Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.

Author : Marilyn Francus
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421407981
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Monstrous Motherhood written by Marilyn Francus and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spectral and monstrous mothers populate the cultural and literary landscape of the eighteenth century, overturning scholarly assumptions about this being an era of ideal motherhood. Although credited with the rise of domesticity, eighteenth-century British culture singularly lacked narratives of good mothers, ostensibly the most domestic of females. With startling frequency, the best mother was absent, disembodied, voiceless, or dead. British culture told tales almost exclusively of wicked, surrogate, or spectral mothers—revealing the defects of domestic ideology, the cultural fascination with standards and deviance, and the desire to police maternal behaviors. Monstrous Motherhood analyzes eighteenth-century motherhood in light of the inconsistencies among domestic ideology, narrative, and historical practice. If domesticity was so important, why is the good mother’s story absent or peripheral? What do the available maternal narratives suggest about domestic ideology and the expectations and enactment of motherhood? By focusing on literary and historical mothers in novels, plays, poems, diaries, conduct manuals, contemporary court cases, realist fiction, fairy tales, satire, and romance, Marilyn Francus reclaims silenced maternal voices and perspectives. She exposes the mechanisms of maternal marginalization and spectralization in eighteenth-century culture and revises the domesticity thesis. Monstrous Motherhood will compel scholars in eighteenth-century studies, women’s studies, family history, and cultural studies to reevaluate a foundational assumption that has driven much of the discourse in their fields.

Author : Rivka Galchen
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0811222977
Total Pages : 96 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Little Labors written by Rivka Galchen and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In paperback at last: Rivka Galchen’s beloved baby bible—slyly hilarious, surprising, and absolutely essential reading for anyone who has ever had, held, or been a baby In this enchanting miscellany, Galchen notes that literature has more dogs than babies (and also more abortions), that the tally of children for many great women writers—Jane Bowles, Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Janet Frame, Willa Cather, Patricia Highsmith, Iris Murdoch, Djuna Barnes, Mavis Gallant—is zero, that orange is the new baby pink, that The Tale of Genji has no plot but plenty of drama about paternity, that babies exude an intoxicating black magic, and that a baby is a goldmine.

Author : Meaghan O'Connell
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 0316393835
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book And Now We Have Everything written by Meaghan O'Connell and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected as One of the Best Books of the Year by: National Public Radio, Esquire, Bustle, Refinery29, Thrillist, Electric Literature, Powell's, Autostraddle, BookRiot, Women.com "Smart, funny, and true in all the best ways, this book made me ache with recognition." -- Cheryl Strayed A raw, funny, and fiercely honest account of becoming a mother before feeling like a grown up. When Meaghan O'Connell got accidentally pregnant in her twenties and decided to keep the baby, she realized that the book she needed -- a brutally honest, agenda-free reckoning with the emotional and existential impact of motherhood -- didn't exist. So she decided to write it herself. And Now We Have Everything is O'Connell's exploration of the cataclysmic, impossible-to-prepare-for experience of becoming a mother. With her dark humor and hair-trigger B.S. detector, O'Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, the fantasies of a "natural" birth experience that erode maternal self-esteem, post-partum body and sex issues, and the fascinating strangeness of stepping into a new, not-yet-comfortable identity. Channeling fears and anxieties that are still taboo and often unspoken, And Now We Have Everything is an unflinchingly frank, funny, and visceral motherhood story for our times, about having a baby and staying, for better or worse, exactly yourself.

Author : Noelia Molina
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429892780
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Motherhood, Spirituality and Culture written by Noelia Molina and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motherhood, Spirituality and Culture explores spiritual skills that may assist women in changes, challenges and transformations undergone through the transition to motherhood. This study comprises rich, qualitative data gathered from interviews with 11 mothers. Results are analysed by constructing seven unique maternal narratives that elucidate and give voice to the mothers in their transition by in depth exploration of six themes emerging from the analysis. Overall discussion ranges across such realities as: • desires, expectations and illusions for mothering; • birth and spiritual embodied experiences of mothering; • instinctual knowing; identity and crisis, and connections of motherhood; • changes and transformations undergone through motherhood. This study presents a unique framework for qualitative studies of spirituality within motherhood research; by weaving together transpersonal psychology, humanistic psychology, spiritual intelligence and the spiritual maternal literature.This book will appeal to all women who have transitioned to motherhood. It willalso be of assistance to professionals who wish to approach any aspect of maternity care and support from a transpersonal perspective. It will also provideunique insights for academics and postgraduate students in the fields of anthropology, psychology, psychotherapy and feminism studies.

Author : Sherry Thurer
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0140246835
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Myths of Motherhood written by Sherry Thurer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1995-05-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking and irreverent history of motherhood is worth a hundred advice books for any mother who’s ever been made to feel guilty or frazzled by society’s impossible expectations. Analyzing data from the psychoanalyst’s couch to the hidden history of wet nursing, psychologist Shari L. Thurer wends her way from the Stone Age to the age of Hillary Rodham Clinton, painting a vivid, often frightening picture of life for mothers and children in a time when their roles were constructed by men. Along the way, she debunks myth after myth—exposing the not-so-golden ages of Classical Greece and the Italian Renaissance, and revealing the pervasive ideal of Dr. Spock’s selfless, stay-at-home mother as the historical aberration it actually was. A work of impassioned scholarship and astonishing range, The Myths of Motherhood does nothing less than recast our conception of good mothering.

Author : Andrea O'Reilly
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 0791485161
Total Pages : 245 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Toni Morrison and Motherhood written by Andrea O'Reilly and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces Morrison's theory of African American mothering as it is articulated in her novels, essays, speeches, and interviews. Mothering is a central issue for feminist theory, and motherhood is also a persistent presence in the work of Toni Morrison. Examining Morrison's novels, essays, speeches, and interviews, Andrea O'Reilly illustrates how Morrison builds upon black women's experiences of and perspectives on motherhood to develop a view of black motherhood that is, in terms of both maternal identity and role, radically different from motherhood as practiced and prescribed in the dominant culture. Motherhood, in Morrison's view, is fundamentally and profoundly an act of resistance, essential and integral to black women's fight against racism (and sexism) and their ability to achieve well-being for themselves and their culture. The power of motherhood and the empowerment of mothering are what make possible the better world we seek for ourselves and for our children. This, argues O'Reilly, is Morrison's maternal theory—a politics of the heart. "As an advocate of 'a politics of the heart,' O'Reilly has an acute insight into discerning any threat to the preservation and continuation of traditional African American womanhood and values ... Above all, Toni Morrison and Motherhood, based on Andrea O'Reilly's methodical research on Morrison's works as well as feminist critical resources, proffers a useful basis for understanding Toni Morrison's works. It certainly contributes to exploring in detail Morrison's rich and complex works notable from the perspectives of nurturing and sustaining African American maternal tradition." — African American Review "O'Reilly boldly reconfigures hegemonic western notions of motherhood while maintaining dialogues across cultural differences." — Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering "Andrea O'Reilly examines Morrison's complex presentations of, and theories about, motherhood with admirable rigor and a refusal to simplify, and the result is one of the most penetrating and insightful studies of Morrison yet to appear, a book that will prove invaluable to any scholar, teacher, or reader of Morrison." — South Atlantic Review "...it serves as a sort of annotated bibliography of nearly all the major theoretical work on motherhood and on Morrison as an author ... anyone conducting serious study of either Toni Morrison or motherhood, not to mention the combination, should read [this book] ... O'Reilly's exhaustive research, her facility with theories of Anglo-American and Black feminism, and her penetrating analyses of Morrison's works result in a highly useful scholarly read." — Literary Mama "By tracing both the metaphor and literal practice of mothering in Morrison's literary world, O'Reilly conveys Morrison's vision of motherhood as an act of resistance." — American Literature "Motherhood is critically important as a recurring theme in Toni Morrison's oeuvre and within black feminist and feminist scholarship. An in-depth analysis of this central concern is necessary in order to explore the complex disjunction between Morrison's interviews, which praise black mothering, and the fiction, which presents mothers in various destructive and self-destructive modes. Kudos to Andrea O'Reilly for illuminating Morrison's 'maternal standpoint' and helping readers and critics understand this difficult terrain. Toni Morrison and Motherhood is also valuable as a resource that addresses and synthesizes a huge body of secondary literature." — Nancy Gerber, author of Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction "In addition to presenting a penetrating and original reading of Toni Morrison, O'Reilly integrates the evolving scholarship on motherhood in dominant and minority cultures in a review that is both a composite of commonalities and a clear representation of differences." — Elizabeth Bourque Johnson, University of Minnesota Andrea O'Reilly is Associate Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University and President of the Association for Research on Mothering. She is the author and editor of several books on mothering, including (with Sharon Abbey) Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment, and Transformation and Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons.

Author : E. Ann Kaplan
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136093729
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Motherhood and Representation written by E. Ann Kaplan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From novels of the nineteenth century to films of the 1990s, American culture, abounds with images of white, middle-class mothers. In Motherhood and Representation, E. Ann Kaplan considers how the mother appears in three related spheres: the historical, in which she charts changing representations of the mother from 1830 to the postmodernist present; the psychoanalytic, which discusses theories of the mother from Freud to Lacan and the French Feminists; and the mother as she is figured in cultural representations: in literary and film texts such as East Lynne, Marnie and the The Handmaid's Tale, as well as in journalism and popular manuals on motherhood. Kaplan's analysis identifies two dominant paradigms of the mother as `Angel' and `Witch', and charts the contesting and often contradictory discourses of the mother in present-day America.