Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword, Lisa Baraitser

Introduction: Motherhood in Literature and Culture

Gill Rye, Victoria Browne, Adalgisa Giorgio, Emily Jeremiah, and Abigail Lee Six

Part I: Pregnancy and Birth

1: Birth Fear and the Subjugation of Women’s Strength: Towards a Broader Conceptualization of Femininity in Birth

Susannah Sweetman

2: The Temporalities of Pregnancy: On Contingency, Loss, and Waiting

Victoria Browne

3: An (Un)Familiar Story: Exploring Ultrasound Poems by Contemporary British Women Writers

Emily Blewitt

4: Birthing Tales and Collective Memory in Recent French Fiction

Valerie Worth-Stylianou

5: Natality, Materiality, Maternity: The Sublime and the Grotesque in Contemporary Sculpture

Christine Battersby

Part II: Generation and Relation

6: Erasing Mother, Seeking Father: Biotechnological Interventions, Anxieties over Motherhood, and Donor Offspring’s Narratives of Self

Gabriele Griffin

7: Mums or Dads? Lesbian Mothers in France

Gill Rye

8: The Kinning of the Transnationally Adopted Child in Contemporary Norway

Signe Howell

9: Ties that Bind in Tanja Dückers’s Novel Himmelskörper: History, Memory, and Making Sense of Motherhood in Twenty-First-Century Germany

Katherine Stone

10: Matrixial Creativity and the Wit(h)nessing of Trauma: Reconnecting Mothers and Daughters in Marosia Castaldi’s Novel Dentro le mie mani le tue: Tetralogia di Nightwater

Adalgisa Giorgo

Part III: Experience and Affect

11: Publicizing Vulnerability: Motherhood and Affect in Joanna Rajkowska’s Post-2011 Art

Justyna Wierzchowska

12: Present and Obscured: Disabled Women as Mothers in Social Policy

Harriet Clarke

13: Nuria C. Botey’s Short Story 'Viviendo con el tío Roy': Motherhood and Risk Assessment under Duress

Abigail Lee Six

14: Broken Nights, Shattered Selves: Maternal Ambivalence and the Ethics of Interruption in Sarah Moss’s Novel Night Waking

Emily Jeremiah

15: Uncertain Mothers: Maternal Ambivalence in Alina Marazzi’s Film Tutto parla di te

Claudia Karagoz

16: 'How to Say Hello to the Sea': Literary Perspectives on Medico-Legal Narratives of Maternal Filicide

Ruth Cain

Part IV: Reflections

17: To Be or Not To Be (a Mother): Telling Academic and Personal Stories of Mothers and Others

Gayle Letherby

18: Last Will and Testament: Potatoes, Love, and Poetry

Ana Luisa Amaral

List of Contributors

Index

About the Author

Gill Rye is Professor Emerita at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London, UK.

Victoria Browne is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

Adalgisa Giorgio is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies of the University of Bath, UK.

Emily Jeremiah is Senior Lecturer in German and Gender Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

Abigail Lee Six is Professor of Spanish at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.