Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts

Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts PDF Author: Elizabeth Podnieks
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 155458292X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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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.

Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts

Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts PDF Author: Elizabeth Podnieks
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1554587654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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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.

Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts

Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts PDF Author: Elizabeth Podnieks
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
ISBN: 9781554581801
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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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.

Motherhood Memoirs: Mothers Creating/Writing Lives

Motherhood Memoirs: Mothers Creating/Writing Lives PDF Author: Justine Dymond
Publisher: Demeter Press
ISBN: 1926452925
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
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.

Gestating a Text, Delivering a Mother

Gestating a Text, Delivering a Mother PDF Author: Maria Bettaglio
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Starting from the exclusion of gestation and motherhood in literary, philosophical, and artistic representation, this dissertation analyzes the metaphor of textual gestation as a mimetic appropriation of female generative power. Beginning with an analysis of the pervasive silence, this dissertation analyzes the relationship between intellectual and bodily gestation. Having theorized the silence imposed upon the maternal body in the Western tradition, I then considered the articulation of maternal voices in Carme Riera and Lucia Etxebarria's narratives, which alike reveal the interplay between gestation and artistic creation that results in the mothering of a text. The overarching questions that my dissertation aims to address are: How can subjectivity be rethought in ways that make it possible to theorize women's voices out of the silence to which they have been relegated by a philosophical tradition that privileges male creativity over the female reproduction? If traditionally the writing process has been considered a male enterprise with the pen functioning as a symbolic phallus, what are the implications of the female text that revolves around the mother? In other words, what are the implications, in literary terms, of "mothering" a text, of creating a text that reflects women's reproductive potential? More generally, is it possible to recuperate maternal voices from the marginalization and exclusion to which they have traditionally been relegated? In order to answer these questions I focus on Carme Riera's "Te entrego, amor, la mar, como una ofrenda" (1975), Una primavera para Domenico Guarini (1980) and Tiempo de espera (19), and Lucia Etxebarria's Un milagro en equilibrio (2004)--texts that display the emergence of maternal voices as the speaking subjects of their narratives. These books reveal the interrelation between bodily and intellectual gestation from a female perspective while showing the development of maternal subjects who chronicle journeys to motherhood through the very act of self-narration. These women reflect on their reproductive experience in a range of private and public writing, from intimate letters and diaries to more impersonal journals, and thus assert female agency in the reproductive process. The gestation of the text happens alongside the emergence of a new maternal subject, one no longer predicated on the name of the father but entirely assumed as a female responsibility. The process of textual genesis, which coincides with the protagonist's bodily gestation, re-appropriates female generative power. Having conjugated intellectual and bodily gestation, these literary mothers give life to a new maternal self.

Motherhood and Creativity in Contemporary Self-Life Writing

Motherhood and Creativity in Contemporary Self-Life Writing PDF Author: Alice Braun
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104011153X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
This book aims to study the representation of motherhood in self-life writing by English-speaking authors. It highlights the particular issues women writers are faced with when they try to combine their vocation as artists with their duties to their children. For those women who claim their right to be both mothers and writers, several cultural myths need to be taken down, chief among which is the representations that we have of what being an artist should be like, as well as the role a mother should have towards her children. This book looks at self-life writing by women from English-speaking countries to reveal the common themes and tropes which recur in texts written on the subject of motherhood, by looking at them from both a literary and a cultural perspective. It also aims to demonstrate that a new generation of women writers is taking up the subject and forging a new literary tradition.

In (M)other Words

In (M)other Words PDF Author: Andrea O'Reilly
Publisher: Demeter Press
ISBN: 1772585289
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
Dr. Andrea O'Reilly is internationally recognized as the founder of Motherhood Studies (2006) and its subfield Maternal Theory (2007), and creator of the concept of Matricentric Feminism, a feminism for and about mothers (2016) and Matricritics, a literary theory and practice for a reading of mother-focused texts (2021). With this collection O'Reilly continues the conversation on the meaning and nature of motherhood initiated by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born close to fifty years ago. In In (M)other Words, O'Reilly shares 25 of her chapters and articles published between 2009-2024 to examine the oppressive and empowering dimensions of mothering and to explore motherhood as institution, experience, subjectivity, and empowerment. The collection considers the central themes and theories of motherhood studies including normative motherhood, feminist mothering, maternal regret, matricentric pedagogy, young mothers, academic motherhood, matricentric feminism, matricritics, motherhood and feminism, the motherhood memoir, the twenty-first-century motherhood movement, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, pandemic mothering, and the motherline.

The Routledge Companion to Motherhood

The Routledge Companion to Motherhood PDF Author: Lynn O'Brien Hallstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351684191
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 671

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Book Description
Interdisciplinary and intersectional in emphasis, the Routledge Companion to Motherhood brings together essays on current intellectual themes, issues, and debates, while also creating a foundation for future scholarship and study as the field of Motherhood Studies continues to develop globally. This Routledge Companion is the first extensive collection on the wide-ranging topics, themes, issues, and debates that ground the intellectual work being done on motherhood. Global in scope and including a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, literature, communication studies, sociology, women’s and gender studies, history, and economics, this volume introduces the foundational topics and ideas in motherhood, delineates the diversity and complexity of mothering, and also stimulates dialogue among scholars and students approaching from divergent backgrounds and intellectual perspectives. This will become a foundational text for academics in Women's and Gender Studies and interdisciplinary researchers interested in this important, complex and rapidly growing topic. Scholars of psychology, sociology or public policy, and activists in both university and workplace settings interested in motherhood and mothering will find it an invaluable guide.

Maternal Abandonment and Queer Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Swedish Literature

Maternal Abandonment and Queer Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Swedish Literature PDF Author: Jenny Björklund
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030728927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
This book questions why so many mothers leave their families in twenty-first-century Swedish literature, analyzing literary representations of maternal abandonment in relation to sociopolitical discourses. The volume draws on a queer-theoretical framework in order to highlight norm-critical dimensions, failure, and resistance in literature about motherhood. Jenny Björklund argues that novels about mothers who leave can be understood as ways to problematize and challenge Swedish-branded values like gender equality and a progressive family politics that promotes ideals of involved parenthood, the nuclear family, and pronatalism. The book also raises questions beyond the Swedish context about maternal ambivalence, family politics, and privilege and discusses how literature can work as resistance and provide alternatives to the current social order.

Space and Place in The Hunger Games

Space and Place in The Hunger Games PDF Author: Deidre Anne Evans Garriott
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786476338
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
An international bestseller and the inspiration for a blockbuster film series, Suzanne Collins's dystopian, young adult trilogy The Hunger Games has also attracted attention from literary scholars. While much of the criticism has focused on traditional literary readings, this innovative collection explores the phenomena of place and space in the novels--how places define people, how they wield power to create social hierarchies, and how they can be conceptualized, carved out, imagined and used. The essays consider wide-ranging topics: the problem of the trilogy's Epilogue; the purpose of the love triangle between Katniss, Gale and Peeta; Katniss's role as "mother"; and the trilogy as a textual "safe space" to explore dangerous topics. Presenting the trilogy as a place and space for multiple discourses--political, social and literary--this work assertively places The Hunger Games in conversation with the world in which it was written, read, and adapted.

Reclaiming Migrant Motherhood

Reclaiming Migrant Motherhood PDF Author: Maria D. Lombard
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666902063
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
The global landscape is dotted with border crossings that can be particularly perilous for displaced women with children in tow. These mothers are often described by their various legal statuses like refugee, migrant, immigrant, forced, or voluntary, but their lived experiences are more complex than a single label. Reclaiming Migrant Motherhood looks at literature, film, and original ethnographic research about the lived experiences of displaced mothers. This volume considers the context of the global refugee crisis, forced migration, and resettlement as backdrops for the representations and identity development of displaced women who mother. Situated within motherhood studies, this book is at the interdisciplinary intersection of literature, life writing, gender, (im)migration, refugee, and cultural studies. Contributors examine literary fiction, memoirs, and children’s literature by Ocean Vuong, Nadifa Mohamed, Laila Halaby, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Terry Farish, Thannha Lai, Bich Minh Nguyen, Julie Otsuka, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Shankari Chandran, and Mary Anne Mohanraj. The book also explores ethnographic research, creative writing, and film related to refugee studies. The border-crossings discussed in the volume are often physical, with stories from Afghanistan, Syria, Vietnam, Japan, Iraq, Canada, Greece, Somalia, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and America. The borders that displaced mothers face are examined through frameworks of postcolonialism, nationalism, feminism, and diaspora studies.