The Literary Mother: Essays on Representations of Maternity and Child Care

by Susan C. Staub (Editor)

Overview

The essays in this book examine the ideology of motherhood in British and American literature from the 16th to the 21st centuries. This book looks at the institution of motherhood, that is, at various cultural interpretations and manipulations of maternity. Presenting mothers whose roles are often empowering yet confining, these essays scrutinize three distinct aspects of motherhood: its social and cultural construction; the significance of maternal absence; and, finally, its representation as an agent of social change. Literary works examined include William Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis; Daniel Defoe's Roxana; John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath; Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury; Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Dorothy Leigh's The Mother's Blessing; and W.S. Penn's Killing Time with Strangers, among others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786430468
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	06/13/2007
Pages:	273
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.55(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Susan C. Staub is an English professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction     

SECTION I: Social and Cultural Negotiations
1. “My throbbing heart shall rock you day and night”: Shakespeare’s Venus, Elizabeth, and Early Modern Constructions of Motherhood     
2. The “Unnatural” Mother-Daughter Relationship in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana     
3. Of Home-Makers and Home-Breakers: The Deserving and the Undeserving Poor Mother in Depression Era Literature     
4. The Construction of Maternity in Southern Literature: Southern Ladies, Southern Mothers, Southern Mammies, and Maternal Sexuality     

SECTION II: Negotiating Absence
5. The Absent Mother: Negotiations of Maternal Presence in the Gothic Mode     
6. “The Instinct of Nature Spoke Audibly”: Representations of the Mother-Child Bond in Mary Shelley’s Fiction     
7. The Contested Site of Maternity in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son     

SECTION III: Negotiating Power
8. Dorothy Leigh’s The Mother’s Blessing and the Political Maternal Voice in Seventeenth-Century England     
9. “I, the Mother”: Inscribing Maternal Right in Early Modern Mothers’ Elegies     
10. The Ethos of Motherhood and Harriet Jacobs’ Vision of Racial Equality in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl     
11. What to Do About Motherhood: Feminist Theory and Feminist Fiction Negotiate Motherhood’s Dilemmas     
12. Ceremony and Power: The Significance of the Mother in Killing Time with Strangers     

About the Contributors     
Index