Susan C. Staub – författare

A form of courtesy literature, Mother's Advice Books were texts written by mothers to instruct their children in religious, educational, and occasionally wordly matters. The three texts included in this volume, Elizabeth Richardson's A Ladies Legacie to her Davghters, Susanna Bell's The Legacy of a Dying Mother To Her Mourning Children, and the unattributed The Mothers Blessing, offer interesting alternatives to the many published male views of the family from the period. Indeed, this volume features an appendix with two much shorter portions of predominantly male-authored texts: Mary Pennyman's letter to her children, published as part of John Pennyman's Instruction to his Children, and Elizabeth Walker's 'For my Dear Children, Mrs.Margaret Walker and Elizabeth Walker', included in Anthony Walker's The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker. The fact that these women were mothers gave them an authority to write that other women were not easily granted, and it is clear that many of these works were written with publication in mind. In addition to giving women public status as authors, these books also enabled them to enter political and religious debates under the guise of offering advice to their children. The Mother's Advice Book is, then, an intriguing genre that simultaneously violates and yet replicates early modern patriarchy.

The essays in this book examine the ideology of motherhood in British and American literature from the 16th to the 21st centuries. This book looks at the institution of motherhood, that is, at various cultural interpretations and manipulations of maternity. Presenting mothers whose roles are often empowering yet confining, these essays scrutinize three distinct aspects of motherhood: its social and cultural construction; the significance of maternal absence; and, finally, its representation as an agent of social change. Literary works examined include William Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis; Daniel Defoe's Roxana; John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath; Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury; Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Dorothy Leigh's The Mother's Blessing; and W.S. Penn's Killing Time with Strangers, among others.

Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination moves plants to the foreground of analysis and brings together some of the rich and innovative ways that scholars are expanding the discussion of plants and botany in Shakespeare’s writings. The essays gathered here all emphasize the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human life, whether culturally, socially, or materially, and vividly illustrate the fundamental role plants play in human identity. As they attend to the affinities and shared materiality between plants and humans in Shakespeare’s works, these essays complicate the comfortable Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. And as they do, they often challenge the privileged position of humans in relation to non-human life..