Over the past fifty years, feminist literary criticism has become theoretical rather than practical, severing any relationship between literary analysis and the real lived experiences of women. An example of this disconnect is the way in which the madwoman in feminist literature has become a lauded icon of liberation, when in reality her situation would be seen as anything but empowered. Finding the Plot takes this example to task, arguing that in fact any interpretation of women’s madness as subversive reinforces the very gender stereotypes that feminist literary criticism should be calling into question.

Conceiving of and representing mothers without their children seems so paradoxical as to be almost impossible. How can we define a mother in the absence of her child? This compelling volume explores these and other questions from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, examining experiences, representations, creative manifestations, and embodiments of mothers without their children. In her 1997 book, entitled Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood, the critic Elaine Tuttle Hansen urged for critical and feminist engagement with what she described as ‘the borders of motherhood and the women who really live there, neither fully inside nor fully outside some recognizable “family unit”, and often exiles from their children’. This book extends and expands this important enquiry, looking at maternal experience and mothering on the borders of motherhood in different historical and cultural contexts, thereby opening up the way in which we imagine and represent mothers without their children to reassessment and revision, and encouraging further dialogue about what it might mean to mother on the borders of motherhood.

Motherhood is one of those roles that assumes an almost-outsized cultural importance in the significance we force it to bear. It becomes both the source of and the repository for all kinds of cultural fears. Its ubiquity perhaps makes it this perfect foil. After all, while not everyone will become a mother, everyone has a mother. When we force motherhood to bear the terrors of what it means to be human, we inflict trauma upon those who mother. A long tradition of bad mothers thus shapes contemporary mothering practices (and the way we view them), including the murderous Medea of Greek mythology, the power-hungry Queen Gertrude of Hamlet, and the emasculating mother of Freud's theories. Certainly, there are mother who cause harm, inflict abuse, act monstrously. Mothers are human. But mothers are also a favourite and easy scapegoat. The contributors to this collection explore a multitude of interdisciplinary representations of mothers that, through their very depictions of bad mothering, challenge the tropes of monstrous mothering that we lean on, revealing in the process why we turn to them. Chapters in Monstrous Mothers: Troubling Tropes explore literary, cinematic, and real-life monstrous mothers, seeking to uncover social sources and results of these monstrosities.

Theory on mothers, mothering and motherhood has emerged as a distinct body of knowledge within Motherhood Studies and Feminist Theory more generally. This collection, The Second Edition of Maternal Theory: Essential Readings introduces readers to this rich and diverse tradition of maternal theory. Composed of 60 chapters the 2nd edition includes two sections: the first with the classic texts by Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, Sara Ruddick, Alice Walker, Barbara Katz Rothman, bell hooks, Sharon Hays, Patricia Hill-Collins, Audre Lorde, Daphne de Marneffe, Judith Warner, Patrice diQinizio, Susan Maushart, and many more. The second section includes thirty new chapters on vital and new topics including Trans Parenting, Non-Binary Parenting, Queer Mothering, Matricentric Feminism, Normative Motherhood, Maternal Subjectivity, Maternal Narratology, Maternal Ambivalence, Maternal Regret, Monstrous Mothers, The Migrant Maternal, Reproductive Justice, Feminist Mothering, Feminist Fathering, Indigenous Mothering, The Digital Maternal, The Opt-Out Revolution, Black Motherhoods, Motherlines, The Motherhood Memoir, Pandemic Mothering, and many more. Maternal Theory is essential reading for anyone interested in motherhood as experience, ideology, and identity.

In Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past, author Tegan Zimmerman contends that there is a need for reading Caribbean women’s texts relationally. This comprehensive study argues that the writer’s turn to maternal histories constitutes the definitive feature of this transcultural and transnational genre. Through an array of Caribbean women’s historical novels published roughly between 1980 and 2010, this book formulates the theory of matria—an imagined maternal space and time—as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for reading fictions of maternal history written by and about Caribbean women. Tracing the development of the historical novel in four periods of the Caribbean past—slavery, colonialism, revolution, and decolonization—this study argues that a pan-Caribbean generation of women writers, of varying discursive racial(ized) realities, has depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs. A politicized concept, matria functions in the historical novel as a counternarrative to traditional historical and literary discourses. Through close readings of the mother/daughter plots in contemporary Caribbean women’s historical fiction, such as Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable, Matria Redux considers the concept of matria an important vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention. Matria as a psychoanalytic, postcolonial strategy therefore envisions, by returning to history, alternative feminist fictions, futures, and Caribbeans.

Winner of the 2019 Broken Frontier Award for Best Book on Comics Today fans still remember and love the British girls’ comic Misty for its bold visuals and narrative complexities. Yet its unique history has drawn little critical attention. Bridging this scholarly gap, Julia Round presents a comprehensive cultural history and detailed discussion of the comic, preserving both the inception and development of this important publication as well as its stories. Misty ran for 101 issues as a stand-alone publication between 1978 and 1980 and then four more years as part of Tammy. It was a hugely successful anthology comic containing one-shot and serialized stories of supernatural horror and fantasy aimed at girls and young women and featuring work by writers and artists who dominated British comics such as Pat Mills, Malcolm Shaw, and John Armstrong, as well as celebrated European artists. To this day, Misty remains notable for its daring and sophisticated stories, strong female characters, innovative page layouts, and big visuals. In the first book on this topic, Round closely analyzes Misty’s content, including its creation and production, its cultural and historical context, key influences, and the comic itself. Largely based on Round’s own archival research, the study also draws on interviews with many of the key creators involved in this comic, including Pat Mills, Wilf Prigmore, and its art editorial team Jack Cunningham and Ted Andrews, who have never previously spoken about their work. Richly illustrated with previously unpublished photos, scripts, and letters, this book uses Misty as a lens to explore the use of Gothic themes and symbols in girls’ comics and other media. It surveys existing work on childhood and Gothic and offers a working definition of Gothic for Girls, a subgenre which challenges and instructs readers in a number of ways.

Mothers have been both idealized and demonized in Western cultures. With Simone de Beauvoir's feminist analysis of motherhood in The Second Sex as her point of departure, Rye (Germanic and Romance studies, U. of London) studies how French autobiographical and fictional narratives of mothering since 1990 differ from those told about them. In the context of societal changes, she explores themes including loss and trauma related to childbirth literally and figuratively, ambivalence and guilt, power and powerlessness, and lesbian and single parenting in the works of Christine Angot, Genevieve Brisac, Marie Darrieussecq, Camille Laurens, Leila Marouane, and Marie Ndiaye among others.

This book is a comprehensive study of Peer Gynt, a drama that forms the foundation of not only the entire Ibsen canon but also modern drama as a whole. It provides scene-by-scene commentary on the drama, showing how the literature and ideas of the drama resemble, and sometimes duplicate, the literature and philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard. It is the first such study since Henri Logeman's commentary on the drama published in 1917. Although the main focus of the book is Ibsen's drama, Bruce Shapiro's study provides some substantial insights into Kierkegaard. He demonstrates how Ibsen's poem was influenced by Kierkegaard's philosophy and literature. One of the most perplexing questions about Peer Gynt is how the ending of the drama functions as a resolution to the whole. This study formulates an understanding, based upon Kierkegaardian philosophy, that accounts for this scene. Moreover, the revelation of Kierkegaard's influence on Ibsen allows the contemporary reader to experience the essence of the drama within the same intellectual context in which it made its first literary appearance. When Kierkegaard's philosophy is artistically brought back into existence through a reader's experience of Peer Gynt, it is as if that reader is a contemporary of those very thoughts. With Kierkegaardian philosophy as the common horizon of understanding, Peer Gynt may be perceived as a complete and unified drama from its beginning to its conclusion. Shapiro's book is the first comprehensive study of Peer Gynt to be published. It may also be the first study to demonstrate one way in which the entire Kierkegaardian dialetic was understood during the philosopher's lifetime. This unique work will be a valuable book for scholars and students of drama, Scandinavian studies, modern philosophy, and existentialism.

Excerpts from criticism of the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, short story writers and other creative writers who lived between 1800 and 1900, from the first published critical appraisals to current evaluations.