San Antonio College Library

"More than another rehearsal of female stereotypes and misogyny in the American writer, but an exploration into how he both feared women, especially maternal figures, and also felt that his creativity was grounded in their power. Draws on both American and French feminist criticism to examine his major novels." -- Publisher.

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...

Motherhood, in Morrison's view, is fundamentally an act of resistance, essential to black women's fight against racism & sexism, & their ability to achieve well-being for themselves & their culture. Andrea O'Reilly explores this theory.

"Throughout human history, motherhood and maternal experience have been largely defined and written by patriarchal culture. Religion, art, medicine, psychoanalysis, and other bastions of male power have objectified the maternal and have disregarded female subjectivity. As a result, maternal perspectives have been ignored and the mother's voice silenced. In recent literary texts, however, more substantial attention has been given to motherhood and...

Publisher description: In recent years, public debate has raged over the issue of maternal choice. While personal testimony and political argument have received widespread attention, artistic representations of birth and abortion have been submerged. Judith Wilt offers the first look at how contemporary writers tell and retell the stories that shape our perceptions about abortion. She reveals that the struggle to plot these painful, complex narratives...

"Raising the Dust identifies a heretofore-overlooked literary phenomenon that author Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls "literary housekeeping." The three writers she examines rejected turn-of-the-century aestheticism and modernism in favor of a literature that is practical, even ostensibly mundane, designed to "set the human household in order."" "To Mary Augusta Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, housekeeping represented public responsibilities:...