Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness

Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness PDF Author: Marilyn Yalom
Publisher: University Park ; London : Pennsylvania State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
This book explores the interrelationship between the option and experience of motherhood and the experience of mental breakdown as vividly communicated by 20th-century women writers. The focus is on three writers--Sylvia Plath, Marie Cardinal, and Margaret Atwood--but others are included, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and Emma Santos. Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness calls attention to the ways in which maternity and motherhood represent common forms of apprehension for all women, reactivating the fear of death that has been discovered and repressed in childhood, and, in some instances, contributing directly to mental breakdown. It offers evidence of the particular stresses encountered by highly gifted women who try to negotiate their way between creation and procreation and "write their way out" of madness.

Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness

Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness PDF Author: Marilyn Yalom
Publisher: University Park ; London : Pennsylvania State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the interrelationship between the option and experience of motherhood and the experience of mental breakdown as vividly communicated by 20th-century women writers. The focus is on three writers--Sylvia Plath, Marie Cardinal, and Margaret Atwood--but others are included, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and Emma Santos. Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness calls attention to the ways in which maternity and motherhood represent common forms of apprehension for all women, reactivating the fear of death that has been discovered and repressed in childhood, and, in some instances, contributing directly to mental breakdown. It offers evidence of the particular stresses encountered by highly gifted women who try to negotiate their way between creation and procreation and "write their way out" of madness.

Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness

Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness PDF Author: Marilyn Yalom
Publisher: University Park ; London : Pennsylvania State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the interrelationship between the option and experience of motherhood and the experience of mental breakdown as vividly communicated by 20th-century women writers. The focus is on three writers--Sylvia Plath, Marie Cardinal, and Margaret Atwood--but others are included, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and Emma Santos. Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness calls attention to the ways in which maternity and motherhood represent common forms of apprehension for all women, reactivating the fear of death that has been discovered and repressed in childhood, and, in some instances, contributing directly to mental breakdown. It offers evidence of the particular stresses encountered by highly gifted women who try to negotiate their way between creation and procreation and "write their way out" of madness.

Finding the plot: A Maternal Approach to Madness in Literature

Finding the plot: A Maternal Approach to Madness in Literature PDF Author: Megan Rigers
Publisher: Demeter Press
ISBN: 1772581607
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Over the past fifty years, feminist literary criticism has become theoretical rather than practical, severing any relationship between literary analysis and the real lived experiences of women. An example of this disconnect is the way in which the madwoman in feminist literature has become a lauded icon of liberation, when in reality her situation would be seen as anything but empowered. Finding the Plot takes this example to task, arguing that in fact any interpretation of women’s madness as subversive reinforces the very gender stereotypes that feminist literary criticism should be calling into question.

Love's Madness

Love's Madness PDF Author: Helen Small
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198184911
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Love's Madness is an important new contribution to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, it presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, femininity, and narrative convention. The book centers around studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bront , Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as of previously neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others.

Mothers and Daughters in Arab Women's Literature

Mothers and Daughters in Arab Women's Literature PDF Author: Dalya Abudi
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004181148
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
This study explores the mother-daughter relationship as the most fundamental and most intimate female relationship. It draws on both early and contemporary writings of Arab women to illuminate the traditional and evolving nature of mother-daughter relationships in Arab families and how these family dynamics reflect and influence modern Arab life.

Becoming Myself

Becoming Myself PDF Author: Irvin D. Yalom
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465098908
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Bestselling writer and psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom puts himself on the couch in a “candid, insightful” (Abraham Verghese) memoir​ Irvin D. Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others. In this profound memoir, he turns his writing and his therapeutic eye on himself. He opens his story with a nightmare: He is twelve, and is riding his bike past the home of an acne-scarred girl. Like every morning, he calls out, hoping to befriend her, "Hello Measles!" But in his dream, the girl's father makes Yalom understand that his daily greeting had hurt her. For Yalom, this was the birth of empathy; he would not forget the lesson. As Becoming Myself unfolds, we see the birth of the insightful thinker whose books have been a beacon to so many. This is not simply a man's life story, Yalom's reflections on his life and development are an invitation for us to reflect on the origins of our own selves and the meanings of our lives.

Handmaidens of the Lord

Handmaidens of the Lord PDF Author: Elaine J. Lawless
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512803839
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Includes life histories of four women preachers, transcriptions of sermons, and analysis by Lawless of both life stories and sermons.

Portia

Portia PDF Author: Edith B. Gelles
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253210234
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Annotation Here, at last, Is the biography that Abigail Adams has long seservedone that puts her, rather than her husband, at its center, and which interprets her life in light of both its eighteenth-century context and recent feminist scholarship. Gelles brings new insights to familiar topics like the Adamss marriage and Abigails wartime role; explains more fully than previous scholars such incidents as the failed courtship of Royall Tyler and Abigail Junior; and examines with sensitivity hitherto little-known episodes like that of Abigails epistolary flirtation with James Lovell during the Revolution or Abigail Juniors mastectomy in 1811. In short, this is a remarkable achievement, far surpassing all earlier attempts to capture the essence of the woman who was one of early Americas greatest letter-writers. Mary Beth Norton Edith Gelles has written a deeply interesting book about Abigail Adams. ... she is careful to reconstruct the eighteenth-century environment of Abigail Adams. De. Gelles is a careful historian of eighteenth-century America and a thoughtful biographer. She has given us a fresh examination of Abigail Adams which will stimulate in helpful ways additional research and discussion. Robert Middlekauf In this important and fascinating biography, Edith Gelles not only restores Abigail Adams to her rightful place at the center of her own story, she challenges the creaky conventions of traditional male-defined biography. Portia breaks ranks with the biographers twiceby refusing to treat Abigail Adams as a reflection of her husband and by refusing to force her lifes story into an artificially linear narrative. In this masterful work, Edith Gelles reconceptualizes and revolutionizes the very notion of biography by capturing experience as it truly unfolds in so many womens livesas a collage of overlapping and circular impressions and feelings, rather than a relentless climb up a ladder of public ambition. Susan Faludi The best biography of Abigail Adams in print. By keeping the spotlight on Mrs. Adams and sensitively evaluating her in eighteenth-century terms, Edith Gelles provides the most rounded portrait yet of this important woman. Patricia U. Bonomi Edith B. Gelles uses the revolutionary years as the backdrop of this sensitive study, And The political events as the drama in which the players act out well-defined roles. ... [Gelless] story of relationships, networks, and power in the context of Abigails eighteenth-century world is truly a superb accomplishment. American Historical Review Adamss strength, courage, and wit ... emerge more fully than they have in any previous work. ... [Gelles] has succeeded in providing a well-rounded portrait of a remarkable figure. Choice Portia ... Is a refreshing change of pace. ... [Edith Gelles] is affectionate yet scholarly, determined to present Adams as a strong character who was very much a woman of her time, not merely a liberated precursor to feminism or the little wife behind the great man. San Francisco Chronicle Portia, The first woman-centered biography of Abigail Adams, details the issues, events, and relationships that informed Adamss life. The portrait that emerges also describes women like her during the Revolutionary era. Much of Abigail Adamss independent reputation derives from the letters that she wrote for over a half-century. Personal and eloquent, they provide unusual access to her private life and capture the social conventions, politics, and people of her age. The letters describe her domestic sphererelationships with her sisters, her daughter and sons, and friends such as Thomas Jefferson. Her marriage to John Adams is considered in the context of the patria.

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking PDF Author: Nephie Christodoulides
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004488383
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking delves deeply into the notion of motherhood in Sylvia Plath’s work in order to redeem Plath from the one-dimensional role assigned to her of the suicidal, father-obsessed poet. Written from the theoretical perspective of Julia Kristeva’s theory of subject formation, the book focuses on Plath’s baby poems in which mother figures are seen as subjects-in-process oscillating between authentication and non-authentication in motherhood. Furthermore, since the mother is always a daughter, part of the discussion centers on Plath’s daughterhood poetry in which daughter figures are engaged in an endless struggle to release themselves from a suffocating maternal hold and achieve their own linguistic individuation. Finally Plath’s works for children, The Bed Book, The-It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit, “Mrs. Cherry’s Kitchen”, as well as her fairy tale poems, largely ignored until now, are read as manifestations of the self’s regressive journey to “once below a time” to grasp an elusive pre-symbolic organization and take signification back to infancy. The book makes extensive use of Plath’s drafts, mainly of the Ariel poems, her recycled materials, annotated books from her personal library, published and unpublished material from The Lilly Library Archive, The Mortimer Rare Book Room, and The Ted Hughes Archive in Emory.

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood PDF Author: Neeru & Anshul Chandra Tandon
Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Dist
ISBN: 9788126910151
Category : Feminism and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Study on the novels of Margaret Atwood, b. 1939, Canadian litterateur.