Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature

Resource Information

The work Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature

Statement of responsibility

by Mary Beth Rose

Creator

• Rose, Mary Beth

Author

• Rose, Mary Beth

Subject

• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Electronic books
• Literature
• Literature
• Literature -- History and criticism
• Literature, Medieval
• Literature, Medieval
• Literature, Modern
• Literature, Modern
• British literature
• British literature

Genre

• Electronic books
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

This book explores the inconsistent literary representations of motherhood in diverse texts ranging from the fourth to the twentieth centuries. Mary Beth Rose unearths plots startling in their frequency and redundancy that struggle to accommodate --or to obliterate--the complex assertions of maternal authority as it challenges traditional family and social structures. The analysis engages two mother plots: the dead mother plot, in which the mother is dying or dead; and the living mother plot, in which the mother is alive and through her very presence in the text, puts often unbearable pressure on the mechanics of the plot. These plots reappear and are transformed by authors as diverse in chronology and use of literary form as Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, Oscar Wilde, and Tony Kushner. The book argues that, insofar as women become the second sex, it is not because they are females per se but because they are mothers; at the same time the analysis probes the transformative political and social potential of motherhood as it appears in contemporary texts like Angels in America

Member of

• Early modern cultural studies

Cataloging source

AUD

Dewey number

809

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

no index present

LC call number

PN715-PN749

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Series statement

Early Modern Cultural Studies