Motherhood and Creativity in Contemporary Self-Life Writing

It discusses the issues women writers are faced with when they try to combine their literary vocation with their duties to their children and it highlights the role of cultural myths in our representations of what being an author and a mother entails.

This book aims to study the representation of motherhood in self-life writing by English-speaking authors. It highlights the particular issues women writers are faced with when they try to combine their vocation as artists with their duties towards their children. For those women who claim their right to be both mothers and writers, several cultural myths need to be taken down, chief among which is the representations that we have of what being an artist should be like, as well as the role a mother should have towards her children. This book looks at self-life writing by women from English-speaking countries to reveal the common themes and tropes which recur in texts written on the subject of motherhood, by looking at them from both a literary and a cultural perspective. It also aims to demonstrate that a new generation of women writers is taking up the subject and forging a new literary tradition.

Autorentext

Alice Braun is a senior lecturer at the Université de Paris Nanterre in France. She has been researching self-life writing by women and is the author of several articles on Janet Frame, Rachel Cusk, Sylvia Plath, and Doris Lessing. Lately, she has been working on the representation of motherhood in literary texts, and particularly childbirth.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments

Introduction A Sound-Proof Room of One's Own

Chapter 1 The Impossible Subject

Chapter 2 To Have and Have Not

Chapter 3 On Pregnancy and Childbirth

Chapter 4 Mother Writing

Chapter 5 Bad Mothers

Conclusion Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater

Index