Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood

Catalina Florina Florescu teaches American drama, theory, and writing at Wagner College. She is the author of the critical work, Transacting Sites of the Liminal Bodily Spaces. She has also written a memoir entitledInventing Me/Exercitii de retrait.

A wonderful compendium of interpretive scholarship about arguably our most important relationship: with our mothers, and with ourselves as mothers. By turns lyrical, intense, and always thoughtful, this is textual analysis at its best. Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood invites us into the dramatic worlds of mothering and trauma, broadly defined, from 18th century English Gothic to Emersonian America—from the Igbo mothers of Nigeria, to the contemporary genre of ‘nobody memoir.’ These are literary essays in both senses of a consistently high standard, offering a wealth of fresh insights into this under-explored yet often misunderstood or ‘disjointed’ figure at the heart of all our lives.

• Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1 A Mother’s Loss of Her Daughter’s Face: Ethical Issues of Facial Disfigurement in Natalie Kusz’s Memoir Road SongGudrun Grabher 2 From Child to Mother: The Disjoint Identity of Charles Robert Maturin’s Immalee Margarita Georgieva3 Solving the “Crumbling” Mother in Nancy Drew Michael Cornelius 4 Feminized and Maternal Bodies: Thresholds to Empowered Rolesin Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron Sharon L. Decker5 The Price We Pay: Motherhood, Marriage and the Struggle toClass Jump in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina Tarah Sweeting-Trotter6Childless Motherhood: the Geopolitics of Maternal Bliss inFatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven Oana M. Chivoiu7 Dismatria: The Quest for a Mother-Land in Igiaba Scego’s Writings Tatjana Babic-Wiilliams8 ‘I wanted to hear her called Mom’: The Grieving Mother and Lost Pregnant Daughter in Sharon Rocha’s For Laci Jennifer Musial 9 Unwanted Mother, Unwanted Motherhood:Competing Maternities in Selby’s Requiem for a Dream Zachary Snider 10 “She Who Dwells Alone …:” Mad Mothers, Old Spinsters and Hysterical Women in William Wordsworth’s Poetry of 1798 Irina Strout 11 Writing, Mothering, and Traumatic Subjectivity in Sapphire’s Push Sherry Ziesenheim & Matthew J. Darling 12 Looking into the Mirror, Inscribing the Blank Slate:18th Century Women Write about Mothering Elizabeth Johnston13 Wise Mother? Insane Mother? Sara Chapman Bull and the Disarticulated Subjectivities of Turn-of-the Century Motherhood Jacqueline Brady14 Maternal Interruption: Reconceiving Political Spaces and Social Agency in Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of MotherhoodMary L. Cappelli 15 Mother-less: Joan Didion’s Blue Nights and David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole Catalina Florina FlorescuAfterword Index About the Authors