Patricia Moran – författare

The female body, with its history as an object of social control, expectation, and manipulation, is central to understanding the gendered construction of shame. Through the study of 20th-century literary texts, The Female Face of Shame explores the nexus of femininity, female sexuality, the female body, and shame. It demonstrates how shame structures relationships and shapes women's identities. Examining works by women authors from around the world, these essays provide an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective on the representations, theories, and powerful articulations of women's shame.

The female body, with its history as an object of social control, expectation, and manipulation, is central to understanding the gendered construction of shame. Through the study of 20th-century literary texts, The Female Face of Shame explores the nexus of femininity, female sexuality, the female body, and shame. It demonstrates how shame structures relationships and shapes women's identities. Examining works by women authors from around the world, these essays provide an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective on the representations, theories, and powerful articulations of women's shame.

As many as one in four women have suffered severe neglect or abuse in childhood. This doubles the likelihood of their suffering clinical depression in adult life. Based on twenty years of systematic research,Wednesday's Child examines why neglect and abuse occur and demonstrates how such negative experience in childhood often results in abusive adult relationships, low self-esteem and depression.Drawing on interviews with over 200 women, the authors show vividly what can be learned from the experience of adult survivors of abuse. Most importantly, Wednesday's Child assesses the factors which can reduce the later impact of such experience on both the children of today and the parents of tomorrow.

As many as one in four women have suffered severe neglect or abuse in childhood. This doubles the likelihood of their suffering clinical depression in adult life. Based on twenty years of systematic research,Wednesday's Child examines why neglect and abuse occur and demonstrates how such negative experience in childhood often results in abusive adult relationships, low self-esteem and depression.Drawing on interviews with over 200 women, the authors show vividly what can be learned from the experience of adult survivors of abuse. Most importantly, Wednesday's Child assesses the factors which can reduce the later impact of such experience on both the children of today and the parents of tomorrow.

Examines the rich and multiple meanings of food in women's writing.Focusing on women's writing of the last two centuries, Scenes of the Apple traces the intricate relationship between food and body image for women. Ranging over a variety of genres, including novels, culinary memoirs, and essays, the contributors explore works by a diverse group of writers, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Toni Morrison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Jeanette Winterson, as well as such nonliterary documents as discussions of Queen Victoria's appetite and news coverage of suffragettes' hunger strikes. Moreover, in addressing works by Hispanic, African, African American, Jewish, and lesbian writers, the book explodes the myth that only white, privileged, and heterosexual women are concerned with body image, and shows the many cultural contexts in which food and cooking are important in women's literature. Above all, the essays pay tribute to the rich and multiple meanings of food in women's writing as a symbol for all kinds of delightful-and transgressive-desires.

Rereads Antonia White's writing within the context of manic-depressive illnessMisdiagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia instead of what was bipolar or manic-depressive illness, Antonia White turned repeatedly to psychoanalysis and Catholicism to resolve the emotional conflicts that she believed were the cause of her tumultuous moods, her inexplicable behaviour, and her writer's block. This study rereads White's writing within the context of manic-depressive illness to show how the misdiagnosis of her illness shaped the identity narratives White constructed in her life-writing and then used as the basis for her strongly autobiographical fiction. White's self-narratives have skewed critical interpretations of her work; at the same time, her fiction has not been studied as expressive of affective disorder. By contextualising White's life-writing and fiction within the contexts of manic-depression and narrative identity, 'Antonia White and Manic-Depressive' Illness proposes a new model for reading White; documents the complex interplay of biological, psychological, and environmental factors involved in affective disorder; and historicises the diagnosis and treatment of White's illness in medical, psychoanalytic, and Catholic contexts.Key FeaturesRereads Antonia White's writing in the context of manic-depressive illness and scholarship on narrative identity and illnessDocuments the ways in which early psychoanalytic theories of female development impacted White through her Freudian analysis in the 1930sDocuments how psychoanalysis and Catholicism served as master narratives or templates for White's stories of self

Rereads Antonia White’s writing within the context of manic-depressive illnessMisdiagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia instead of what was bipolar or manic-depressive illness, Antonia White turned repeatedly to psychoanalysis and Catholicism to resolve the emotional conflicts that she believed were the cause of her tumultuous moods, her inexplicable behaviour, and her writer’s block. This study rereads White’s writing within the context of manic-depressive illness to show how the misdiagnosis of her illness shaped the identity narratives White constructed in her life-writing and then used as the basis for her strongly autobiographical fiction. White’s self-narratives have skewed critical interpretations of her work; at the same time, her fiction has not been studied as expressive of affective disorder. By contextualising White’s life-writing and fiction within the contexts of manic-depression and narrative identity, Antonia White and Manic-Depressive Illness proposes a new model for reading White; documents the complex interplay of biological, psychological, and environmental factors involved in affective disorder; and historicises the diagnosis and treatment of White’s illness in medical, psychoanalytic, and Catholic contexts. Key FeaturesRereads Antonia White’s writing in the context of manic-depressive illness and scholarship on narrative identity and illnessDocuments the ways in which early psychoanalytic theories of female development impacted White through her Freudian analysis in the 1930sDocuments how psychoanalysis and Catholicism served as master narratives or templates for White’s stories of self