Literary Mother

Susan C. Staub is an English professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

• Table of ContentsIntroduction      SECTION I: Social and Cultural Negotiations1. “My throbbing heart shall rock you day and night”: Shakespeare’s Venus, Elizabeth, and Early Modern Constructions of Motherhood      2. The “Unnatural” Mother-Daughter Relationship in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana      3. Of Home-Makers and Home-Breakers: The Deserving and the Undeserving Poor Mother in Depression Era Literature      4. The Construction of Maternity in Southern Literature: Southern Ladies, Southern Mothers, Southern Mammies, and Maternal Sexuality      SECTION II: Negotiating Absence5. The Absent Mother: Negotiations of Maternal Presence in the Gothic Mode      6. “The Instinct of Nature Spoke Audibly”: Representations of the Mother-Child Bond in Mary Shelley’s Fiction      7. The Contested Site of Maternity in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son      SECTION III: Negotiating Power8. Dorothy Leigh’s The Mother’s Blessing and the Political Maternal Voice in Seventeenth-Century England      9. “I, the Mother”: Inscribing Maternal Right in Early Modern Mothers’ Elegies      10. The Ethos of Motherhood and Harriet Jacobs’ Vision of Racial Equality in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl      11. What to Do About Motherhood: Feminist Theory and Feminist Fiction Negotiate Motherhood’s Dilemmas      12. Ceremony and Power: The Significance of the Mother in Killing Time with Strangers      About the Contributors      Index