Writing Mothers and Daughters

Renegotiating the Mother in Western European Narratives by Women
Herausgeber: Giorgio, Adalgisa

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The psychoanalytic discovery of the importance of the pre-oedipal mother-daughter bond in the 1970s generated a vast amount of feminist theory attempting to identify the specificity of, and give value to, the daughter's relationship to her mother. At the same time women writers engaged in the complex task of representing this highly conflictual relationship which had been largely absent in women's narrative until then. Although much criticism has been written on individual texts, no systematic study of the development of this theme in Western European fiction exists. This book offers the first comparative assessment of the subject-matter in England, France, Germany and Austria, Ireland, Italy, and Spain in the second half of last century. The six main chapters explore the interplay between narrative strategies, psychic structures, and socio-political and cultural processes in the textual representation of the relationship in each country, thus providing original interpretations both of classic texts by established writers and of more recent narratives by new or emerging authors. Among the writers featured are Steedman, Diski, Winterson, Tennant, de Beauvoir, Leduc, Djura, Wolf, Jelinek, Mitgutsch, Novak, Lavin, O'Brien, O'Faoláin, Morante, Sanvitale, Ramondino, Chacel, Rodoreda, Martín Gaite.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Berghahn Books
• Seitenzahl: 274
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. April 2002
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 235mm x 157mm x 19mm
• Gewicht: 554g
• ISBN-13: 9781571819536
• ISBN-10: 1571819533
• Artikelnr.: 44841573

Autorenporträt

Adalgisa Giorgio is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Bath.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Mothers and Daughters in Western Europe: Mapping the Territory
A. Giorgio
Chapter 2. Writing the Mother-Daughter Relationship: Psychoanalysis,
Culture, and Literary Criticism
A. Giorgio
Chapter 3. Towards a Female Symbolic: Re-Presenting Mothers and Daughters
in Contemporary Spanish Narrative by Women
C. Arkinstall
Chapter 4. 'The Horror of the Unlived Life': Mother-Daughter Relationships
in Contemporary Irish Women's Fiction
A. Fogarty
Chapter 5. The Passion for the Mother: Conflicts and Idealisations in
Contemporary Italian Narrative by Women
A. Giorgio
Chapter 6. Writing Mother-Daughter Relationality in the French Context
Alex Hughes
Chapter 7. Bad Daughters and Unmotherly Mothers: The New Family Plot in the
Contemporary English Novel
P. Splendore
Chapter 8. Power and Powerlessness: Mothers and Daughters in Postwar German
and Austrian Literature
C. Weedon
Notes on Contributors
Index