Mickey Pearlman - Böcker

Despite extraordinary attention within the past five years by novelists, playwrights, and critics, the subject of mothers and daughters, and motherhood and daughterhood, has remained complicated and compelling. Mother Puzzles is a unique collection that examines how women who write have dealt with those relationships. Pearlman notes in her introduction that missing mothers--mothers who are physically present but emotionally absent--are often found in works by women. The question this collection addresses is why the mother, as currently portrayed in American literature by women, has moved from sainted marginality (as icon), to vicious caricature (as destroyer), to the puzzling figure that emerges here, and why these works are often also about incest and sexual abuse.Among the authors studied are Sue Miller, Tillie Olsen, Marilyn French, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, Marsha Norman, and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. Feminist/literary/psychological analyses of Housekeeping, Lovingkindness, Fierce Attachments, Men and Angels, 'night Mother, The Snow Queen, and The Good Mother are included. These essays will interest scholars in American literature, readers of contemporary fiction, and those interested in Women's Studies.

Why are so many fictional characters named Anna (or a variant), and what does this signify? The startling prevalence of Hannah/Anna/Anne moves from biblical literature (Old Testament Hannah and New Testament St. Anne) to classics (Anna Karenina and Anne Elliot) to popular fiction (Anna Dunlop in Sue Miller's The Good Mother), children's literature (Anne of Green Gables), films (Hannah and Her Sisters), and horror (Annie Wilkes in Stephen King's Misery). Does this represent a conscious or unconscious search for the ultimate or missing mother harking back to mythical and religious traditions?Here twenty-two essayists--literary scholars, writers, historians, classicists, feminist theorists--rise to the challenge, examining Annas in individual literary works or making intriguing connections. Universals and particulars are sorted out as the related names and themes cross time, culture, gender, and racial borders. In the process, much new and fascinating literary criticism is revealed about dozens of authors, including Anthony Trollope, John Berryman, Sean O'Faolain, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Sexton, Arnold Bennett, Doris Lessing, Tillie Olsen, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mona Simpson, Mary Lavin, and, yes, Sigmund Freud.

American literature is no longer the refuge of the solitary hero. Like the society it mirrors, it is now a far richer, many-faceted explication of a complicated and diverse society -- racially, culturally, and ethnically interwoven and at the same time fractured and fractious.Ten women writing fiction in America today -- Toni Cade Bambara, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Mary Lee Settle -- represent that geographic, ethnic, and racial diversity that is distinctively American. Their differing perspectives on literature and the American experience have produced Erdrich's stolid North Dakota plainswomen; Didion's sun-baked dreamers and screamers; the urban ethnics -- Irish, Jewish, and black -- of Gordon, Schaeffer, and Bambara; Oates's small-town, often violent, neurotics; Lurie's intellectual sophisticates; and the southern survivors and victims, male and female, of Phillips, Settle, and Godwin.The ten original essays in this collection focus on the traditional themes of identity, memory, family, and enclosure that pervade the fiction of these writers. The fictional women who emerge here, as these critics show, are often caught in the interwoven strands of memory, perceive literal and emotional space as entrapping, find identity elusive and frustrating, and experience the interweaving of silence, solitude, and family in complex patterns.Each essay in this collection is followed by bibliographies of works by and about the writer in question that will be invaluable resources for scholars and general readers alike. Here is a readable critical discussion of ten important contemporary novelists who have broadened the pages of American literature to reflect more clearly the people we are.