Download or read book Maternity Mortality and the Literature of Madness written by Marilyn Yalom and published by University Park ; London : Pennsylvania State University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interrelationship between the option and experience of motherhood and the experience of mental breakdown as vividly communicated by 20th-century women writers. The focus is on three writers--Sylvia Plath, Marie Cardinal, and Margaret Atwood--but others are included, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and Emma Santos. Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness calls attention to the ways in which maternity and motherhood represent common forms of apprehension for all women, reactivating the fear of death that has been discovered and repressed in childhood, and, in some instances, contributing directly to mental breakdown. It offers evidence of the particular stresses encountered by highly gifted women who try to negotiate their way between creation and procreation and "write their way out" of madness.
Download or read book Maternity Mortality and the Literature of Madness written by Marilyn Yalom and published by University Park ; London : Pennsylvania State University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interrelationship between the option and experience of motherhood and the experience of mental breakdown as vividly communicated by 20th-century women writers. The focus is on three writers--Sylvia Plath, Marie Cardinal, and Margaret Atwood--but others are included, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and Emma Santos. Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness calls attention to the ways in which maternity and motherhood represent common forms of apprehension for all women, reactivating the fear of death that has been discovered and repressed in childhood, and, in some instances, contributing directly to mental breakdown. It offers evidence of the particular stresses encountered by highly gifted women who try to negotiate their way between creation and procreation and "write their way out" of madness.
Download or read book Finding the plot A Maternal Approach to Madness in Literature written by Megan Rigers and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Love s Madness written by Helen Small and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love's Madness is an important new contribution to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, it presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, femininity, and narrative convention. The book centers around studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bront , Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as of previously neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others.
Download or read book Mothers and Daughters in Arab Women s Literature written by Dalya Abudi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-11-11 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the mother-daughter relationship as the most fundamental and most intimate female relationship. It draws on both early and contemporary writings of Arab women to illuminate the traditional and evolving nature of mother-daughter relationships in Arab families and how these family dynamics reflect and influence modern Arab life.
Download or read book The Monster Within written by Barbara Almond and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mixed feelings about motherhood—uncertainty over having a child, fears of pregnancy and childbirth, or negative thoughts about one’s own children—are not just hard to discuss, they are a powerful social taboo. In this beautifully written book, Barbara Almond brings this troubling issue to light. She uncovers the roots of ambivalence, tells how it manifests in lives of women and their children, and describes a spectrum of maternal behavior—from normal feelings to highly disturbed mothering. In a society where perfection in parenting is the unattainable ideal, this compassionate book also shows how women can affect positive change in their lives.
Download or read book Margaret Atwood written by Neeru & Anshul Chandra Tandon and published by Atlantic Publishers & Dist. This book was released on 2009 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Study on the novels of Margaret Atwood, b. 1939, Canadian litterateur.
Download or read book Re hybridizing Transnational Domesticity and Femininity written by Stacey Weber-F&ève and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2010-01-05 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Re-hybridizing Transnational Domesticity and Femininity examines the problems of voicing the personal when considering the role and place of women in the home. Analyzing a collection of first-person cinematic and literary narratives by Assia Djebar, Annie Ernaux, Simone de Beauvoir, Raja Amari, Coline Serreau, Le la Sebbar, and Yamina Benguigui; Weber-F_ve explores the transnational processes of identity formation, gender performance, and construction of culture and society. Through a closer look at contemporary representations of French, Algerian, and Tunisian women on the page and on the screen, this study discusses the ways in which homemaking, nation, and gender are intricately bound to one another and situated in personal history. Working within, as well as beyond, so-called national systems of visual and written representation, these women artists challenge inherited and monolithic performances, definitions, and discourses of femininity. In doing so, they create re-hybridized subjects that begin to recognize and embrace the differences within themselves. The authors and filmmakers in this study-through their female protagonists, the protagonists' homes and homemaking acts, and the investigative lens of the interrogation of the personal-are interested in exploring how the process of uncovering or articulating new and 'other' identities and subjectivities ushers in new and 're-hybridized' ways of seeing, knowing, and being female.
Download or read book Just Talk written by Lilian R. Furst and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While countless memoirs have been written about depression and therapy, no one has examined how the "talking cure" of psychotherapy is presented in novels and other works of literature. Beginning with an overview of the principles of psychotherapy and its growing use as a treatment for mental and emotional disorders, Lilian Furst addresses the patient's view of the value of talk. Patients' portrayals of psychotherapy in literary works range from serious to satirical and from comic to ironic, with some descriptions verging on the grotesque. Furst identifies the overtalkers, undertalkers, and duet voices that shape the individual experiences of psychotherapy. While the voices of the overtalkers overwhelm those of their therapists, undertalkers are reluctant to express or acknowledge their feelings. Particularly revealing are the instances where patient and therapist provide separate but parallel renderings of the same therapy. Just Talk looks at a wide range of questions about psychotherapy. Furst considers the patient's first impressions of the therapist and how the patient is prompted to engage in talk. She looks for signs of self-deception or self-betrayal on the patient's part and asks how the therapist's behavior affects the patient's responses and the ultimate outcome of the therapy. Furst examines such well-known works as Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, Plath's The Bell Jar, and Lodge's Therapy, as well as lesser-known novels, to discuss how patients react to psychotherapy as a cure for mental and emotional disorders. Her analysis of these narratives adds significantly to our understanding of the dynamic relationship between patient and therapist and reveals much about the healing process that is not addressed in technical casebooks.
Download or read book Revealing Lives written by Susan Groag Bell and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1990-10-18 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book gender is the lens through which autobiography and biography are scrutinized. The authors show what is revealed when they magnify the gendered aspects of both men's and women's writing. The eternal questions of identity, choice, responsibility, happiness, tragedy, and even death are interpreted in terms of gender analysis. The book presents a sequence of studies from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century that includes individuals such as American poet Anne Sexton and German writers Christa Wolf and Paul Celan, and groups such as nineteenth-century Mexican women and members of the British working class. It extends the paradigm of "self-reflexive" literature to include and highlight the overlap between autobiography and biography, especially in the case of women who often wrote their lives obliquely through the biographies of their famous male relatives, e. g., Adèle Hugo and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. The authors refuse to accept a monolithic conception of gender. The studies of Charles and Mary Lamb, Nadezhda Durova, and John Stuart Mill demonstrate that even in the nineteenth century, a binary gender system is inadequate as a mode of approach to actual life stories.
Download or read book Becoming Myself written by Irvin D. Yalom and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling writer and psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom puts himself on the couch in a lapidary memoir Irvin D. Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others. In this profound memoir, he turns his writing and his therapeutic eye on himself. He opens his story with a nightmare: He is twelve, and is riding his bike past the home of an acne-scarred girl. Like every morning, he calls out, hoping to befriend her, "Hello Measles!" But in his dream, the girl's father makes Yalom understand that his daily greeting had hurt her. For Yalom, this was the birth of empathy; he would not forget the lesson. As Becoming Myself unfolds, we see the birth of the insightful thinker whose books have been a beacon to so many. This is not simply a man's life story, Yalom's reflections on his life and development are an invitation for us to reflect on the origins of our own selves and the meanings of our lives.
Download or read book Writing the Talking Cure written by Jeffrey Berman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Irvin D. Yalom is also the United States' most well-known author of psychotherapy tales. His first volume of essays, Love's Executioner, became an immediate best seller, and his first novel, When Nietzsche Wept, continues to enjoy critical and popular success. Yalom has created a subgenre of literature, the "therapy story," where the therapist learns as much as, if not more than, the patient; where therapy never proceeds as expected; and where the therapist's apparent failure provesultimately to be a success. Writing the Talking Cure is the first book to explore all of Yalom's major writings. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Jeffrey Berman comments on Yalom's profound contributions to psychotherapy and literature and emphasizes the recurrent ideas that unify his writings: the importance of the therapeutic relationship, therapist transparency, here-and-now therapy, the prevalence of death anxiety, reciprocal healing, and the idea of the wounded healer. Throughout, Berman discusses what Yalom can teach therapists in particular and the common (and uncommon) reader in general.
Download or read book Barbara Kingsolver s World written by Linda Wagner-Martin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-05-16 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revised edition of Linda Wagner-Martin's comprehensive study of the novels, stories, essays and poetry of American author Barbara Kingsolver. Now updated so that coverage runs from Kingsolver's first novel, The Bean Trees, through to her most recent, Demon Copperhead. Author of the only biography of Barbara Kingsolver and of a reader's guide to The Poisonwood Bible, Wagner-Martin has become the leading authority on this Pulitzer-prize-wining author. Here she covers every work in Kingsolver's oeuvre, emphasizing the writer's blend of the scientific method in which she was formally trained with her convincing understanding of the human characters that fill her books. What Kingsolver achieves throughout all her writing is a seamless blending of the various parts of human existence. She melds important themes through parts and pieces of the natural world-the African snakes, the Monarch butterflies, the coyotes in Deanna Wolfe's existence. Repeatedly Kingsolver writes to create both characters and the characters' worlds, bringing all these pieces into masterful, and whole, realities. This edition includes two new chapters - one on her 2018 novel, Unsheltered, and the second on her 2022 novel, Demon Copperhead - and is the first study of Kingsolver to publish since she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023.
Download or read book Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking written by Nephie Christodoulides and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking delves deeply into the notion of motherhood in Sylvia Plath’s work in order to redeem Plath from the one-dimensional role assigned to her of the suicidal, father-obsessed poet. Written from the theoretical perspective of Julia Kristeva’s theory of subject formation, the book focuses on Plath’s baby poems in which mother figures are seen as subjects-in-process oscillating between authentication and non-authentication in motherhood. Furthermore, since the mother is always a daughter, part of the discussion centers on Plath’s daughterhood poetry in which daughter figures are engaged in an endless struggle to release themselves from a suffocating maternal hold and achieve their own linguistic individuation. Finally Plath’s works for children, The Bed Book, The-It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit, “Mrs. Cherry’s Kitchen”, as well as her fairy tale poems, largely ignored until now, are read as manifestations of the self’s regressive journey to “once below a time” to grasp an elusive pre-symbolic organization and take signification back to infancy. The book makes extensive use of Plath’s drafts, mainly of the Ariel poems, her recycled materials, annotated books from her personal library, published and unpublished material from The Lilly Library Archive, The Mortimer Rare Book Room, and The Ted Hughes Archive in Emory.
Download or read book Handmaidens of the Lord written by Elaine J. Lawless and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-08-05 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes life histories of four women preachers, transcriptions of sermons, and analysis by Lawless of both life stories and sermons.
Download or read book Sylvia Plath s Fiction written by Luke Ferretter and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study devoted to Sylvia Plath's fiction covering The Bell Jar and all of her published and unpublished short stories drawing extensively on archival material.
Download or read book Portia written by Edith B. Gelles and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Here, at last, Is the biography that Abigail Adams has long seservedone that puts her, rather than her husband, at its center, and which interprets her life in light of both its eighteenth-century context and recent feminist scholarship. Gelles brings new insights to familiar topics like the Adamss marriage and Abigails wartime role; explains more fully than previous scholars such incidents as the failed courtship of Royall Tyler and Abigail Junior; and examines with sensitivity hitherto little-known episodes like that of Abigails epistolary flirtation with James Lovell during the Revolution or Abigail Juniors mastectomy in 1811. In short, this is a remarkable achievement, far surpassing all earlier attempts to capture the essence of the woman who was one of early Americas greatest letter-writers. Mary Beth Norton Edith Gelles has written a deeply interesting book about Abigail Adams. ... she is careful to reconstruct the eighteenth-century environment of Abigail Adams. De. Gelles is a careful historian of eighteenth-century America and a thoughtful biographer. She has given us a fresh examination of Abigail Adams which will stimulate in helpful ways additional research and discussion. Robert Middlekauf In this important and fascinating biography, Edith Gelles not only restores Abigail Adams to her rightful place at the center of her own story, she challenges the creaky conventions of traditional male-defined biography. Portia breaks ranks with the biographers twiceby refusing to treat Abigail Adams as a reflection of her husband and by refusing to force her lifes story into an artificially linear narrative. In this masterful work, Edith Gelles reconceptualizes and revolutionizes the very notion of biography by capturing experience as it truly unfolds in so many womens livesas a collage of overlapping and circular impressions and feelings, rather than a relentless climb up a ladder of public ambition. Susan Faludi The best biography of Abigail Adams in print. By keeping the spotlight on Mrs. Adams and sensitively evaluating her in eighteenth-century terms, Edith Gelles provides the most rounded portrait yet of this important woman. Patricia U. Bonomi Edith B. Gelles uses the revolutionary years as the backdrop of this sensitive study, And The political events as the drama in which the players act out well-defined roles. ... [Gelless] story of relationships, networks, and power in the context of Abigails eighteenth-century world is truly a superb accomplishment. American Historical Review Adamss strength, courage, and wit ... emerge more fully than they have in any previous work. ... [Gelles] has succeeded in providing a well-rounded portrait of a remarkable figure. Choice Portia ... Is a refreshing change of pace. ... [Edith Gelles] is affectionate yet scholarly, determined to present Adams as a strong character who was very much a woman of her time, not merely a liberated precursor to feminism or the little wife behind the great man. San Francisco Chronicle Portia, The first woman-centered biography of Abigail Adams, details the issues, events, and relationships that informed Adamss life. The portrait that emerges also describes women like her during the Revolutionary era. Much of Abigail Adamss independent reputation derives from the letters that she wrote for over a half-century. Personal and eloquent, they provide unusual access to her private life and capture the social conventions, politics, and people of her age. The letters describe her domestic sphererelationships with her sisters, her daughter and sons, and friends such as Thomas Jefferson. Her marriage to John Adams is considered in the context of the patria.
