Notes on the Contributors

Chapters in this book

1. Front Matter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgements ix
4. Maternal Literatures in Text and Tradition: Daughter-Centric, Matrilineal, and Matrifocal Perspectives 1
5. Maternal Absence
6. Aberrant, Absent, Alienated: Reading the Maternal in Jane Urquhart’s First Two Novels, The Whirlpool and Changing Heaven 31
7. Motherless Daughters: The Absent Mothers in Margaret Atwood 47
8. Writing about Abusive Mothers: Ethics and Auto/biography 63
9. “Red Mother”: The Missing Mother Plot as Double Mystery in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction 79
10. “This was her punishment”: Jew, Whore, Mother in the Fiction of Adele Wiseman and Lilian Nattel 95
11. Maternal Ambivalence
12. Eden Robinson’s “Dogs in Winter”: Parodic Extremes of Mothering 111
13. Subverting the Saintly Mother: The Novels of Gabrielle Poulin 125
14. “Opaque with confusion and shame”: Maternal Ambivalence in Rita Dove’s Poetry 141
15. Maternal Blitz: Harriet Lovatt as Postpartum Sufferer in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child 157
16. We Need to Talk about Gender: Mothering and Masculinity in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin 169
17. Maternal Agency
18. Narrating Maternal Subjectivity: Memoirs from Motherhood 187
19. The Motherhood Memoir and the “New Momism”: Biting the Hand That Feeds You 203
20. “I had to make a future, willful, voluble, lascivious”: Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Disruptive Lesbian Maternal Narratives 215
21. Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature 227
22. But She’s a Mom! Sex, Motherhood, and the Poetry of Sharon Olds 241
23. (Grand)mothering “Children of the Apocalypse”: A Post-postmodern Ecopoetic Reading of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners 253
24. Maternal Communication
25. Colonialism’s Impact on Mothering: Jamaica Kincaid’s Rendering of the Mother– Daughter Split in Annie John 273
26. Mother to Daughter: Muted Maternal Feminism in the Fiction of Sandra Cisneros 287
27. Cracking (Mother) India 303
28. Asian American Mothering in the Absence of Talk Story: Obasan and Chorus of Mushrooms 317
29. Baby, Boo-Boo, and Bobs: The Matrilineal Auto/ biographies of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, and Eleanor Lanahan 333
30. Revelations and Representations: Birth Stories and Motherhood on the Internet 351
31. “Stories to Live By”: Maternal Literatures and Motherhood Studies 367
32. Notes on the Contributors 375
33. Index 379