Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction and Life Writing

This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

1. Ambivalent Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering: From Normal and Natural to Not-at-all -- 2. One Hand Clapping: The Loneliness of Motherhood in Lucia Berlin’s “Tiger Bites” -- 3. “their mothers, and their fathers, and everyone in between”: Queering Motherhood in Trans Parent Memoirs by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Trystan Reese -- 4. Struggling to Become a Mother: Literary Representations of Involuntary Childlessness -- 5. Orality/Aurality and Voice of the Voiceless Mother in Abla Farhoud’s Happiness Has a Slippery Tail -- 6. From Survivor to Im/migrant Motherhood and Beyond: Margit Silberstein’s Postmemorial Autobiography, Förintelsens Barn -- 7. The (M)other’s Voice: Representations of Motherhood in Contemporary Swiss Writing by Women -- 8. Contested Motherhood in Autobiographical Writing: Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti -- 9. A Plea for Motherhood: Mothering and Writing in Contemporary Norwegian Literature.