Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-216) and index
Historical and theoretical perspectives on motherhood -- Toni Morrison. The bluest eye : the inverted maternal -- Sula : finding the peace of the mother's body -- Beloved : historical realities/maternal mythologies -- Bobbie Ann Mason. In country : mothers, dead babies, and war -- Spence + Lila : memory, landscape, and the mother's body -- Feather crowns : commodifying Southern motherhood -- Lee Smith. Oral history : telling the mother's story -- Fair and tender ladies : letters, language, and maternal subjectivity -- Saving grace : mediating the matriarchal-patriarchal dichotomy -- Conclusion : "listening to the stories that mothers have to tell."
"Throughout human history, motherhood and maternal experience have been largely defined and written by patriarchal culture. Religion, art, medicine, psychoanalysis, and other bastions of male power have objectified the maternal and have disregarded female subjectivity. As a result, maternal perspectives have been ignored and the mother's voice silenced. In recent literary texts, however, more substantial attention has been given to motherhood and to the physical, psychological, social, and cultural dynamics affecting maternal experience. In Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith, Paula Gallant Eckard examines how maternal experience is depicted in selected novels by three American writers, emphasizing how they focus on the body and the voice of the mother."--Jacket
