Price: $39.95
Page Count: 250
Publication Date: September 2026
ISBN: 978-1-77258-598-8
This book is an important look at the intersection between mothering/motherhood studies and psychology.
Using close analysis of texts, literary metonymy and metaphor, and personal/professional contemplations, this book brings together a body of work that is essential to understand motherhood through the lens of psychology and psychology through the lens of motherhood.
- Dr. Denise Handlarski, Associate Professor, Trent University
The invisibility of mothers, except as silent saints, has long been memorialized in literature. This book challenges such stereotypes, for example, by exploring how the Canadian government pushes the task of teaching literacy onto already overburdened mothers. An exploration of literature through several relevant texts adds to the complex picture. Mothers who elect not to do mother work, and others, as non-biological mothers, take on the care of other people’s children. There are further deviations. Mothers whose lives are loaded with the additional burden of caring for disabled children, or those who suffer the loss of babies unable to survive far beyond birth, or those burdened with postpartum depression. Stereotypical motherhood is a myth buoyed by patriarchy. Books like this help to scuttle the ship.
- Dr Elisabeth Hanscombe, who holds academic status at Flinders University, Australia, is a psychologist, writer, mother and grandmother, railing against gender coercion and the patriarchal constraints that bind us.
Introduction: Laurie Kruk, “Stories of Mothers … Mothering Through Time”
Chapter 1: Jane Barker, “Pen and Ink: A Neverending Story”
Chapter 2: Tina Benevides, “’Thursday’s Child’: Navigating Identity, Literacy, and Motherhood Across Cultures”
Chapter 3: Melissa Corrente, “Momoir Revealed: Moving from Narrative Revelation to Reformation”
Chapter 4: Rupinder Kahlon and Sarah Boddy, “Motherhood and Literacy: Celebrating the Moments and Problematizing the Construction”
Chapter 5: Masha Blokh, “Love of Books, Love of Children: A Mother’s Story”
Chapter 6: Laura Lafrance, “Mothering as ‘the Greats of Arts’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Complex Maternal Psyche in ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and Herland”
Chapter 7: Paula Serrano Elena, “Challenging the Ideal of Motherhood: Unveiling Maternal Violence in Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery”
Chapter 8: Kristen Ferguson, “Depictions of Mothers in Award-Winning Governor General’s Illustrated Books for Young People”
Chapter 9: Laurie Kruk, “’Disconcerting, and Wonderful’: Second-Wave Female Friendship and Mothering in Alice Munro’s ‘Differently’”
Chapter 10: Andrea O’Reilly, “’It remakes you’ and ‘changes one’s existence forever’: Reading Matrescence in Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy and Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel to Explore and Reimagine Normative Moterhood”
Conclusion: Kristen Ferguson
Notes on Contributors
Dr. Laurie Kruk is a Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University. She has published The Voice Is the Story: Conversations with Canadian Writers of Short Fiction (2003) and Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story (2016). She has also published three poetry collections: Theories of the World (1992), Loving the Alien (2006) and My Mother Did Not Tell Stories (2012). In terms of Munro scholarship, she has recently published “The Children Leave: Maternal Abandonment in Two Alice Munro Stories” in Maternal Regret: Resistances, Renunciations, and Reflections, ed. Andrea O’Reilly (Demeter 2022).
Dr. Kristen Ferguson is a Professor, the Dr. Elizabeth Thorn Chair in Literacy, and Interim Associate Dean in the Schulich School of Education at Nipissing University in North Bay. She teaches Language Arts and Literacy Education. Her research interests include elementary and post-secondary literacy education, literacy coaching, and stress and coping in teaching, alongside mothering scholarship informed by her experiences as a mother of three.
