Author: Gill Rye Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1317235479 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
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: 3030774074 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
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: Roberta Garrett Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers ISBN: 1786605198 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Although a large body of work has emerged which addresses neoliberal representations of the family in other cultural forms (such as parenting advice programmes) little has been written specifically on the family and contemporary literature. This book examines the growing body of autobiographical and fictional writing on family and parenting issues in Anglo-American culture from the late 1990s to the present day. The book looks closely at six distinct genres which have arisen during this time frame: the misery memoir, the mum’s lit popular novel, the maternal confessional, ‘dads’ lit, the dysfunctional domestic novel and the family noir. Writing the Modern Family will examine the way these burgeoning areas of British and American writing respond to a neoliberal public discourse in which a ‘parenting deficit’ rather than economic and structural disadvantage, is responsible for increasing inequality in child welfare and achievement. In evaluating these forms and their relationship to neoliberal culture, the book will also consider the complex interrelationship between these genres.
Author: E. Ann Kaplan Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136093729 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
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.
Author: Elizabeth Podnieks Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press ISBN: 1554587654 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
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.
Author: Navleen Multani Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000967530 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 125
Book Description
Resistance and Identity in Twenty-First Century Literature and Culture: Voices of the Marginalized is a compendium of reflections on literary texts, politics of literature and culture. The book proffers ruminations on the pivotal role of constructive and positive resistance to reconstruct identities for meaningful human existence. The disciplinary power and dominance coerce the natural body to resist and yearn for freedom. One can establish unique identity by refusing to conform to pressures of society that deform the natural body. Dominant forces and oppressive structures evoke resistance that can range from 'polite demurral' to 'refusal'. Resistance comes from the 'will' that refuses to be controlled and governed. The 'refusal' of the ordinary illuminates ordinary lives/ bodies. Language and literary texts contain essential truths of such human existence. Words and imaginary worlds in literary works reveal truth and suggest possibilities for reconfiguring the order.
Author: Jolene Zigarovich Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 131551771X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
This book contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which Gothic literature, visual media, and other cultural forms explicitly engage gender, sexuality, form, and genre. The collection is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of subject areas and methodologies. It is concerned with several questions, including: How can we discuss Gothic as a genre that crosses over boundaries constructed by a culture to define and contain gender and sexuality? How do transgender bodies specifically mark or disrupt this boundary crossing? In what ways does the Gothic open up a plural narrative space for transgenre explorations, encounters, and experimentation? With this, the volume’s chapters explore expected categories such as transgenders, transbodies, and transembodiments, but also broader concepts that move through and beyond the limits of gender identity and sexuality, such as transhistories, transpolitics, transmodalities, and transgenres. Illuminating such areas as the appropriation of the trans body in Gothic literature and film, the function of trans rhetorics in memoir, textual markers of transgenderism, and the Gothic’s transgeneric qualities, the chapters offer innovative, but not limited, ways to interpret the Gothic. In addition, the book intersects with but also troubles non-trans feminist and queer readings of the Gothic. Together, these diverse approaches engage the Gothic as a definitively trans subject, and offer new and exciting connections and insights into Gothic, Media, Film, Narrative, and Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Author: Shari Thurer Publisher: ISBN: 9780395584156 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 428
Book Description
"Given a voice, what would the Great Goddess, the Virgin Mary, Snow White's evil stepmother, or Portnoy's mom have said about child care, contraception, bonding, or breast-feeding? Would their feelings have mattered? After all, maternity has been constructed by men over the millennia. Aristotle thought mother's womb merely cooked father's seed. The Church preferred virgins to mothers, and Freud was father-fixated. Even a brief survey of history reveals a diversity of maternal practices and ideals that are at odds with each other as well as with the views of contemporary child-care experts and psychologists." ""I cannot recall ever treating a mother who did not harbor shameful secrets about how her behavior or feelings damaged her children," writes Thurer. Today our sentimentalized conception of the good mother casts a long, guilt-inducing shadow over real mothers' lives. Never has there been so much advice and so little agreement. Never have the ideals of motherhood been as ambiguous, psychologically demanding, and unforgiving. One conclusion is certain: the "good mother" is a cultural invention." "In this brilliant synthesis of history, psychology, the arts, and religion, Thurer shows how our current concept of the ideal mother, like all ideology, is culture-bound, historically specific, and hopelessly tied to fashion. Thurer exposes our current myths of motherhood as a backlash against recent gains in women's rights and control over their bodies." ""For thousands of years, because of her awesome ability to spew forth a child, mother has been feared and revered. She has been the subject of taboos, witch hunts, mandatory pregnancy, and confinement in a separate sphere. She has endured appalling insults and perpetual marginalization. She has also been the subject of glorious painting, chivalry, and idealization. Through it all she has rarely been consulted." The Myths of Motherhood, finally, is her story."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315307650 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
This book explores the Gothic mode as it appears in the literature, visual arts, and culture of different areas of Latin America. Focusing on works from authors in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, the Andes, Brazil, and the Southern Cone, the essays in this volume illuminate the existence of native representations of the Gothic, while also exploring the presence of universal archetypes of terror and horror. Through the analysis of global and local Gothic topics and themes, they evaluate the reality of a multifaceted territory marked by a shifting colonial and postcolonial relationship with Europe and the United States. The book asks questions such as: Is there such a thing as "Latin American Gothic" in the same sense that there is an "American Gothic" and "British Gothic"? What are the main elements that particularly characterize Latin American Gothic? How does Latin American Gothic function in the context of globalization? What do these elements represent in relation to specific national literatures? What is the relationship between the Gothic and the Postcolonial? What can Gothic criticism bring to the study of Latin American cultural manifestations and, conversely, what can these offer the Gothic? The analysis performed here reflects a body of criticism that understands the Gothic as a global phenomenon with specific manifestations in particular territories while also acknowledging the effects of "Globalgothic" on a transnational and transcultural level. Thus, the volume seeks to open new spaces and areas of scholarly research and academic discussion both regionally and globally with the presentation of a solid analysis of Latin American texts and other cultural phenomena which are manifestly related to the Gothic world.
Author: Gill Rye
Author: Laura Lazzari
Author: Roberta Garrett
Author: Toni Bowers
Author: E. Ann Kaplan
Author: Elizabeth Podnieks
Author: Navleen Multani
Author: Jolene Zigarovich
Author: Shari Thurer
Author: Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno