Mothering Care in the Contemporary Novel: Unknown Others, Imaginative Labour and the Ethics of Care

Examining contemporary depictions of less-than-adequate mothers, Michelle Chiang reveals how care relations are fundamentally othering experiences, even between a mother and a child. Employing maternal theory and phenomenological philosophy as lenses to analyse the selected novels, Chiang offers an account of the imaginative labour that goes into caring for an other who is not entirely knowable. She argues that carers must imaginatively labour to confront the limits of their knowledge in ca...