Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction and Life Writing

Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction and Life Writing PDF

Author: Helena Wahlström Henriksson

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-03-16

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 3031172116

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This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

Narratives of Mothering

Narratives of Mothering PDF

Author: Gill Rye

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0874130409

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Mothers have been both idealized and demonized in Western cultures. With Simone de Beauvoir's feminist analysis of motherhood in The Second Sex as her point of departure, Rye (Germanic and Romance studies, U. of London) studies how French autobiographical and fictional narratives of mothering since 1990 differ from those told about them. In the context of societal changes, she explores themes including loss and trauma related to childbirth literally and figuratively, ambivalence and guilt, power and powerlessness, and lesbian and single parenting in the works of Christine Angot, Genevieve Brisac, Marie Darrieussecq, Camille Laurens, Leila Marouane, and Marie Ndiaye among others.

Motherhood Memoirs: Mothers Creating/Writing Lives

Motherhood Memoirs: Mothers Creating/Writing Lives PDF

Author: Justine Dymond

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2013-07-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1926452925

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The authors in this collection examine and critique motherhood memoir, alongside the texts of their own lives, while seeking to transform mothering practice— highlighting revolutionary praxis within books, or, when none is available, creating new visions for social change. Many essays interrogate the tensions of maternal narrative—the negotiation of the historical location of writer and readers, narrative and linguistic constraints, and the slippery ground of memory—as well as the borders constructed between the “objective” scholar and the reader who engages with and identifies with texts through her intellect and her emotional being.

Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts

Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts PDF

Author: Elizabeth Podnieks

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2011-04-07

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1554587654

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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.

Mother, She Wrote

Mother, She Wrote PDF

Author: Yi-Lin Yu

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780820469003

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In this enjoyable and insightful book, Yi-Lin Yu takes the heated and ongoing feminist debate over motherhood and maternal subjectivity onto a new plane - in search of a new synthesis. With its specific focus on the three-tiered matrilineal narratives, Mother, She Wrote is distinguished by its complex and innovative deployment of psychoanalytic subject-relations theories, and a meticulous and detailed discussion of various literary texts, which calls forth a powerful reformulation of these narratives. One of the main strengths of this book is this simultaneous and tactful command of theory and literary practice. Apart from advocating the burgeoning development of women's writing of matrilineal narratives, the author also sheds new light on further research in the area of feminist motherhood and mothering.

Writing Mothers

Writing Mothers PDF

Author: BettyAnn Martin

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781772582796

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The story of motherhood is told through many voices and in many contexts. When honoured with the task of composing a collective story from our authors' experiences, we gestured toward the function and power of story to transform. The collection is organized in three movements that mirror the interdependent narrative acts of reflecting, re-imagining, and re-writing. By reflecting, we refer to conscious engagement with experience that makes meaningful connections between past, present, and potential futures, provides context for who we understand ourselves to be, and guides our awareness of the.

21st-Century Narratives of Maternal Ambivalence

21st-Century Narratives of Maternal Ambivalence PDF

Author: Rachel Williamson

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-10-17

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 3031393511

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Motherhood has long been depicted in reductive or limited terms. At once valorized and configured as the ultimate end-goal for socially condoned femininity, maternity is also highly mediated and scrutinized. This has resulted in a representational tradition that persists in imagining maternal subjects in rigid binary terms, pitting good mothers against bad. Largely in response to this repressive schema, recent years have marked the emergence of a diverse range of visual and literary texts about motherhood. While such texts vary in style, genre and form, this book argues that they are unified in their efforts to publicize embodied maternal experience and foreground maternal ambivalence, a concept that is best understood as a mother’s capacity to simultaneously love and hate her child. Although maternal ambivalence has become an increasingly popular topic of study with maternal scholars, its articulation within contemporary representations and narratives has yet to be adequately theorized and addressed, and this book aims to fill this gap.

Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined

Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined PDF

Author: Andrea J. Buchanan Amy Hudock

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2010-06-29

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 1458778711

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Becoming a mother takes more than the physical act of giving birth or completing an adoption: it takes birthing oneself as a mother through psychological, intellectual, and spiritual work that continues throughout life. Yet most women's stories of personal growth after motherhood tend to remain untold. As writers and mothers, Andrea Buchanan and Amy Hudock were frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of writing by mothers that captured the ambiguity, complexity, and humor of their experiences. So they decided to create the place they wanted to find, with the kind of writing they wanted to read. This unique collection features the best of the online magazine literarymama.com, a site devoted to mama-centric writing with fresh voices, superior craft, and vivid imagery. While the majority of literature on parenting is not literary or is not written by mothers, this book is both. Including creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Literary Mama celebrates the voices of the maternally inclined, paves the way for other writer mamas, and honors the difficult and rewarding work women do as they move into motherhood.

Mother Reader

Mother Reader PDF

Author: Moyra Davey

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2001-05-01

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9781583220726

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The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe first-hand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. Many of the writers articulate difficult and socially unsanctioned maternal anger and ambivalence. In Mother Reader, motherhood is scrutinized for all its painful and illuminating subtleties, and addressed with unconventional wisdom and candor. What emerges is a sense of a community of writers speaking to and about each other out of a common experience, and a compilation of extraordinary literature never before assembled in a single volume.

From the Personal to the Political

From the Personal to the Political PDF

Author: Andrea O'Reilly

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781575911298

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From the Personal to the Political seeks to analyze the autobiographical perspective of mothering and motherhood not purely as their inner, emotional and private narratives. The collection aims at evidentiating how autobiographical writing gives voice to the historically determined experience of mothering and makes visible the importance of mothers as resilient and political agents. The volume is divided into two sections. The first focuses on what may be termed "autobiographical theory." The contributors in this section use their life stories to theorize upon a social maternal perspective such as that as single mothers, mothers of children with disabilities, mothers of older children, and mothers of bi-racial children. The focus of the second section is on autobiographical narratives and includes readings of memoirs, slave narratives, poetry, and fiction. The essays in this volume position autobiography, in both theory and fiction, as a profoundly cultural and political text that makes social change possible. Andrea O'Reilly is Associate Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University. Silvia Caporale Bizzini is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Alicante.

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