Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature

Mary Beth Rose is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. Formerly editor of Renaissance Drama, she is the author of Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature; The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama;  and co-editor of Elizabeth I: Collected Works.

• Introduction:  Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature.- One:  Time, Narrative, and Maternity in Augustine’s Confessions.- Chapter Two:  Maternal Abandonment, Maternal Deprivation: Tales of Griselda in Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Shakespeare.- Chapter Three: Maternal Authority and the Conflicts it Generates in Early Modern Dramatic Plots.- Chapter Four: Milton and Maternal Authority: Why is the Virgin Mary in Paradise Regained?.- Chapter Five: The Emergence of the Mother in Oscar Wilde’s Comic Plots.- Chapter Six: Angels in America:  The Transformation of Maternal Plotting and the Transformation of the Family.- Epilogue.- Bibliography.- Index.