Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts

Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures
Herausgeber: Podnieks, Elizabeth; O'Reilly, Andrea

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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.

---

Hinweis: Dieser Artikel kann nur an eine deutsche Lieferadresse ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Seitenzahl: 402
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. Januar 2010
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 227mm x 155mm x 24mm
• Gewicht: 562g
• ISBN-13: 9781554581801
• ISBN-10: 155458180X
• Artikelnr.: 27010714

Inhaltsangabe

Table of Contents for
Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's
Literatures edited by Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O'Reilly
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Maternal Literatures in Text and Tradition: Daughter-Centric,
Matrilineal, and Matrifocal Perspectives Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea
O'Reilly
Part 1: Maternal Absence
1. Aberrant, Absent, Alienated: Reading the Maternal in Jane Urquhart's
First Two Novels, The Whirlpool and Changing Heaven Myrl Coulter
2. Motherless Daughters: The Absent Mothers in Margaret Atwood Nancy
Peled
3. Writing about Abusive Mothers: Ethics and Auto/biography Kate Douglas
4. "Red Mother": The Missing Mother Plot as Double Mystery in Louise
Erdrich's Fiction Sheila Hassell Hughes
5. "This was her punishment": Jew, Whore, Mother in the Fiction of Adele
Wiseman and Lilian Nattel Ruth Panofsky
Part 2: Maternal Ambivalence
6. Eden Robinson's "Dogs in Winter": Parodic Extremes of Mothering
Nathalie Foy
7. Subverting the Saintly Mother: The Novels of Gabrielle Poulin Kathleen
Kellett-Betsos
8. "Opaque with confusion and shame": Maternal Ambivalence in Rita Dove's
Poetry Elizabeth Beaulieu
9. Maternal Blitz: Harriet Lovatt as Postpartum Sufferer in Doris Lessing's
The Fifth Child Denys Landry
10. We Need to Talk about Gender: Mothering and Masculinity in Lionel
Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin Emily Jeremiah
Part 3: Maternal Agency
11. Narrating Maternal Subjectivity: Memoirs from Motherhood Joanne S.
Frye
12. The Motherhood Memoir and the "New Momism": Biting the Hand That Feeds
You Andrea O'Reilly
13. "I had to make a future, willful, voluble, lascivious": Minnie Bruce
Pratt's Disruptive Lesbian Maternal Narratives Susan Driver
14. Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature Gill Rye
15. But She's a Mom! Sex, Motherhood, and the Poetry of Sharon Olds Rita
Jones
16. (Grand)mothering "Children of the Apocalypse": A Post-postmodern
Ecopoetic Reading of Margaret Laurence's The Diviners Di Brandt
Part 4: Maternal Communication
17. Colonialism's Impact on Mothering: Jamaica Kincaid's Rendering of the
Mother--Daughter Split in Annie John Nicole Willey
18. Mother to Daughter: Muted Maternal Feminism in the Fiction of Sandra
Cisneros Rita Bode
19. Cracking (Mother) India Tanja Stampfl
20. Asian American Mothering in the Absence of Talk Story: Obasan and
Chorus of Mushrooms Anne-Marie Lee-Loy
21. Baby, Boo-Boo, and Bobs: The Matrilineal Auto/biographies of Zelda
Sayre Fitzgerald, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, and Eleanor Lanahan Elizabeth
Podnieks
22. Revelations and Representations: Birth Stories and Motherhood on the
Internet Kim Hensley Owens
Coda: "Stories to Live By": Maternal Literatures and Motherhood Studies
Andrea O'Reilly
Notes on the Contributors
Index
About the Contributors
Elizabeth Beaulieu (PhD) is dean of the Core Division at Champlain College
in Burlington, Vermont, where she oversees the design and implementation of
a new interdisciplinary curriculum. She is the author or editor of Black
Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered
(1999), The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia (2003), and Writing African American
Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and about Women of Color (2006).
Rita Bode is associate professor of English literature at Trent University
in Oshawa, where she is currently serving as associate dean. Her main area
of research is nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American and British
literature. She has published on the maternal presence/absence in
Melville's Moby-Dick and in the writings of L. M. Montgomery.
Di Brandt holds a Canada Research Chair in Canadian Literature and Creative
Writing at Brandon University, Manitoba. She is the author of numerous
award-winning books of poetry, essays, an opera, and a novel. Her books on
mothers and mothering include: questions I asked my mother (1987), mother,
not mother (1992), Wild Mother Dancing: Maternal Narrative in Canadian
Literature (1993), and So This Is the World & Here I Am in It (1997). Her
website address is www.dibrandt.ca.
Myrl Coulter (BA, MA, PhD University of Alberta) specializes in Canadian
literature and writing practices. Her writing and research interests are
feminism, maternal theory, literary nonfiction, and popular culture. Her
work explores writing as a highly complex process influenced by social,
cultural, political, and environmental forces.
Kate Douglas is a senior lecturer in the Department of English, Creative
Writing and Australian Studies at Flinders University (South Australia).
She is the author of Trauma Texts (with Professor Gillian Whitlock) and
Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory.
Susan Driver is an assistant professor in communication studies at York
University. She has written Queer Girls and Popular Culture and edited the
collection Queer Youth Cultures.
Nathalie Foy teaches Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. Her
most recent project is an examination of motherhood in contemporary
Canadian fiction.
Joanne S. Frye is professor emerita of English and women's studies at the
College of Wooster in Ohio. Author of Living Stories, Telling Lives and
Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction, she has recently completed a
memoir about her experiences as a single mother, titled Biting the Moon.
Sheila Hassell Hughes is associate professor and Chair of English at the
University of Dayton, Ohio. Born and raised in British Columbia, she earned
her MA (English) from the University of Toronto and PhD (women's studies)
from Emory University. Her research focuses on gender and religion in
Louise Erdrich's work.
Emily Jeremiah is a lecturer in German at Royal Holloway, University of
London. She is the author of Troubling Maternity: Mothering, Agency, and
Ethics in Women's Writing in German of the 1970s and 1980s. Her research
interests include mothering, migration, gender, and sexuality.
Rita M. Jones (PhD, Washington State University) is the director of the
women's centre and affiliate faculty in women's studies at Lehigh
University. She was formerly the director of women's studies at the
University of Northern Colorado. Her research interests include motherhood
in America and connections between feminist movement and literature.
Kathleen Kellet-Betsos is associate professor in the Department of French
and Spanish Languages and Literatures at Ryerson University, specializing
in Franco-Canadian literature. She has published articles on authors such
as Louise Maheux-Forcier, Anne Hébert, and Daniel Poliquin in various
journals including Québec Studies and Studies in Canadian Literature.
Denys Landry is a PhD candidate at the University of Montreal, where he
also teaches English composition. His dissertation focuses on prostitution
in the work of Tennessee Williams. His fields of interest include drama,
American literature, gender studies, and popular culture (with special
emphasis on Madonna).
Anne-Marie Lee-Loy is assistant professor in the English Department at
Ryerson University. Currently she is exploring how Asian Caribbean and
Asian American experiences intersect. Her articles and essays have appeared
in Asian Studies Review, Anthurium, The Arts Journal, and the collection
The Chinese in the Caribbean. Her book Searching for Mr. Chin:
Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Literature is
forthcoming with Temple University Press.
Andrea O'Reilly is associate professor in the School of Women's Studies at
York University. She is editor of more than 12 books, including Feminist
Mothering. O'Reilly is author of Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics
of the Heart and Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism, and
the Possibility of Empowered Mothering. O'Reilly is director of the
Association for Research on Mothering, the Journal of the Association for
Research on Mothering, and Demeter Press. She is editor of the first ever
encyclopedia on motherhood, forthcoming 2010.
Kim Hensley Owens is assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at the
University of Rhode Island. She recently developed and taught a graduate
seminar entitled Rhetorics of/and Reproduction. Her writing appears in such
journals as Written Communication and Pedagogy. Kim is currently at work on
a book project focusing on the rhetorics of childbirth.
Ruth Panofsky is professor of English at Ryerson University, where she
specializes in Canadian literature and culture. She is the author of The
Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman and At Odds in the
World: Essays on Jewish Canadian Women Writers. Her volume of poetry,
Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices, received the 2008 Helen and Stan
Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry.
Nancy Peled PhD, teaches literature at Haifa University and coordinates the
academic English program at Oranim Academic College in northern Israel. Her
research interests include modern female authors and stereotypic paradigms
of expression in contemporary narratives. A former Canadian, she lives on a
kibbutz where she raised her four children.
Elizabeth Podnieks is an associate professor in the Department of English
at Ryerson University. Her teaching and research interests include
mothering, life writing, modernism, and popular/celebrity culture. She is
the author of Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf,
Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaï Nin and the co-editor of Hayford
Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and Modernist Aesthetics.
Gill Rye (Phd, University College, London) is Reader at the Institute of
Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, and director of the
Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing. Publications include
Reading for Change, Women's Writing in Contemporary France (co-edited), and
Narratives of Mothering: Women's Writing in Contemporary France.
Tanja Stampfl, a native of Italy, is assistant professor in the English
Department at the University of the Incarnate Word. Her research and
teaching centre on the convergence of race, gender, and identity in
twentieth-century postcolonial and world literature.
Nicole Willey is an associate professor of English at Kent State University
Tuscarawas, where she teaches African American and other literatures. Her
research interests include mothering, memoir, nineteenth-century American
literature, and slave narratives. She wrote Creating a New Ideal of
Masculinity for American Men: The Achievement of Sentimental Women Writers
in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and is currently working on a collection
about motherhood memoirs.