Mother without their children [Paperback]

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.Charlotte Beyer is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. Her background is in Women’s Studies, and she has a long-standing interest in motherhood and maternal studies. Charlotte has published widely on crime fiction and contemporary literature. Her edited monograph Teaching Crime Fiction will be published in summer 2018.  Charlotte’s co-edited monograph for Demeter Press, Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel with Janet MacLennan, Dorsía Smith Silva, and Marjorie Tesser will be published in spring 2019. She is on the Editorial Boards for the journals Feminist Encounters, The New Americanist, and American, British and Canadian Studies, anl3Ž