Price: $34.95
Page Count: 264
Publication Date: July 2013
ISBN: 978-1-927335-16-1
“Dymond’s and Willey’s anthology on mothering and memoirs is a welcome addition to scholarship on women’s literature and mothering studies. This collection of essays serves as a feminist corrective to the marginalization of mothers’ voices within autobiography studies as well as within studies of autobiographical criticism itself.”
—Jocelyn F. Stitt, Co-editor of Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato
“In examining the now well-established genre of motherhood memoirs across diverse historical, cultural, and literary traditions, the collection makes an important and timely advance on what contributors rightly argue is an understudied area of scholarship. Drawing on existing work in the fields of Motherhood, Autobiography, and Literary Studies, contributors extend the vital discussion of maternal life writings in their consideration of topics such as postpartum depression, autism, slave narratives, and same-sex parenting. The contributors register ways to challenge and transform conventional approaches to and representations of mothering as they fuse academic discourse with autotheory in compellingly personal and political terms.”
—Elizabeth Podnieks, Associate Professor, Department of English, Ryerson University; Editor, Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture and Co-editor, Textual Mothers/ Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Literatures
Justine Dymond and Nicole Willey, "Introduction by the Editors: Creating the Collection"
Section 1: The Art of Motherhood
Chapter 1: Rachel Epp Buller, "Visualizing Motherhood: The "Memory Work" of Mother Artists"
Chapter 2: Yelizaveta Renfro, "How to Write the Motherhood Memoir: Writing Guides for Mothers"
Chapter 3: Melissa Shields Jenkins, "A Long Private Letter": Motherhood and Text in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell"
Chapter 4: Lori Greenstone, "Liminal Ekphrasis: Mediating Motherhood with a Shield"
Section 2: What the Other Books Don't Tell Us
Chapter 5: Pamela Douglas, "Milkmother Memoir"
Chapter 6: Justine Dymond, "'Where's the funeral?': Maternal Silences in Memoirs of Postpartum Depression"
Chapter 7: Rachel Robertson, "Lost and Found: Intimacy and Distance in Three Motherhood Memoirs about Autistic Children"
Chapter 8: Kathleen L. Fowler, "'Just another mother who has lost her child': Memoirs of Caregiving and Loss"
Section 3: Mothers without Borders
Chapter 9: Tara McDonald Johnson, "Transcending the Mind/Body Dichotomy to Save My Own Life"
Chapter 10: Lisa Federer, "We Are Family: Creating Lesbian Motherhood through Online Community"
Chapter 11: Deesha Philyaw, "Letter to a Young Black Mama on Writing Motherhood Memoir"
Chapter 12: Nicole Willey, "In Search of Our Mothers' Memoirs: Form and Function in African American Motherhood in Letters"
Nicole Willey is an associate professor of English at Kent State University Tuscarawas, where she teaches African American and other literatures, along with a variety of writing courses. Her research interests include mothering, memoir, nineteenth-century American literature, and slave narratives. She wrote Creating a New Ideal of Masculinity for American Men: The Achievement of Sentimental Women Writers in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. She lives in New Philadelphia, Ohio with her husband and two sons.
Justine Dymond is an assistant professor of English at Springfield College, where she teaches writing and literature. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her publications include essays on Linda Hogan, Mourning Dove, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, and she is the Editor of a special cluster in Modern Language Studies on 9/11 literature and culture. Her fiction and poetry have been published in numerous journals, including The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and The Briar Cliff Review. Her short story “Cherubs” was selected for an O. Henry Prize and also appeared on the list of distinguished stories in the 2006 Best American Short Stories. She lives in western Massachusetts with her family.
