Download or read book Toni Morrison and Motherhood written by Andrea O'Reilly and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces Morrison's theory of African American mothering as it is articulated in her novels, essays, speeches, and interviews. Mothering is a central issue for feminist theory, and motherhood is also a persistent presence in the work of Toni Morrison. Examining Morrison's novels, essays, speeches, and interviews, Andrea O'Reilly illustrates how Morrison builds upon black women's experiences of and perspectives on motherhood to develop a view of black motherhood that is, in terms of both maternal identity and role, radically different from motherhood as practiced and prescribed in the dominant culture. Motherhood, in Morrison's view, is fundamentally and profoundly an act of resistance, essential and integral to black women's fight against racism (and sexism) and their ability to achieve well-being for themselves and their culture. The power of motherhood and the empowerment of mothering are what make possible the better world we seek for ourselves and for our children. This, argues O'Reilly, is Morrison's maternal theory—a politics of the heart. "As an advocate of 'a politics of the heart,' O'Reilly has an acute insight into discerning any threat to the preservation and continuation of traditional African American womanhood and values ... Above all, Toni Morrison and Motherhood, based on Andrea O'Reilly's methodical research on Morrison's works as well as feminist critical resources, proffers a useful basis for understanding Toni Morrison's works. It certainly contributes to exploring in detail Morrison's rich and complex works notable from the perspectives of nurturing and sustaining African American maternal tradition." — African American Review "O'Reilly boldly reconfigures hegemonic western notions of motherhood while maintaining dialogues across cultural differences." — Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering "Andrea O'Reilly examines Morrison's complex presentations of, and theories about, motherhood with admirable rigor and a refusal to simplify, and the result is one of the most penetrating and insightful studies of Morrison yet to appear, a book that will prove invaluable to any scholar, teacher, or reader of Morrison." — South Atlantic Review "...it serves as a sort of annotated bibliography of nearly all the major theoretical work on motherhood and on Morrison as an author ... anyone conducting serious study of either Toni Morrison or motherhood, not to mention the combination, should read [this book] ... O'Reilly's exhaustive research, her facility with theories of Anglo-American and Black feminism, and her penetrating analyses of Morrison's works result in a highly useful scholarly read." — Literary Mama "By tracing both the metaphor and literal practice of mothering in Morrison's literary world, O'Reilly conveys Morrison's vision of motherhood as an act of resistance." — American Literature "Motherhood is critically important as a recurring theme in Toni Morrison's oeuvre and within black feminist and feminist scholarship. An in-depth analysis of this central concern is necessary in order to explore the complex disjunction between Morrison's interviews, which praise black mothering, and the fiction, which presents mothers in various destructive and self-destructive modes. Kudos to Andrea O'Reilly for illuminating Morrison's 'maternal standpoint' and helping readers and critics understand this difficult terrain. Toni Morrison and Motherhood is also valuable as a resource that addresses and synthesizes a huge body of secondary literature." — Nancy Gerber, author of Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction "In addition to presenting a penetrating and original reading of Toni Morrison, O'Reilly integrates the evolving scholarship on motherhood in dominant and minority cultures in a review that is both a composite of commonalities and a clear representation of differences." — Elizabeth Bourque Johnson, University of Minnesota Andrea O'Reilly is Associate Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University and President of the Association for Research on Mothering. She is the author and editor of several books on mothering, including (with Sharon Abbey) Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment, and Transformation and Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons.

Download or read book Toni Morrison ON Mothers and Motherhood written by Lee Baxter and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the gamut of Toni Morrison’s novels from her earliest to her most recent. Each of the essays examines the various ways in which Morrison’s work delineates and interrogates Western culture’s ideological norms of mothers, motherhood, and mothering. The essays consider Morrison’s female, and in some cases male, characters as challenging the concept that mothering and motherhood is a stable notion. The essays reveal both that mothering is a central concept in Morrison’s work and that an examination of this pervasive notion illuminates her corpus as a whole. Toni Morrison on Mothers and Motherhood offers a wide range of scholarship that provides a compelling look at Morrison’s work through an array of interdisciplinary approaches that are grounded in feminist/gender studies. This interdisciplinary collection of essays will be of interest to scholars and critics concerned with the notions of how we define mother/motherhood/mothering and the problem of its interpretation within Western society, as well as those engaged in the interpretation of African-American literature, and Morrison’s work in particular.

Download or read book Mother Reader written by Moyra Davey and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2001-05-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe first-hand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. Many of the writers articulate difficult and socially unsanctioned maternal anger and ambivalence. In Mother Reader, motherhood is scrutinized for all its painful and illuminating subtleties, and addressed with unconventional wisdom and candor. What emerges is a sense of a community of writers speaking to and about each other out of a common experience, and a compilation of extraordinary literature never before assembled in a single volume.

Download or read book Representations of Motherhood written by Donna Bassin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the maternal experience from the mother's point of view. The book questions a society that has devalued and sentimentalized motherhood, and presents images of generative and creative women who are also mothers. It also discusses the portrayal of mothers in art, film and literature.

Download or read book Mothers written by Jacqueline Rose and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice. Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers.

Download or read book Toni Morrison written by Toni Morrison and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty years of interviews with the author of The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and other novels

Download or read book From Motherhood to Mothering written by Andrea O'Reilly and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years since the publication of Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born, the topic of motherhood has emerged as a central issue in feminist scholarship. Arguably still the best feminist book on mothering and motherhood, Of Woman Born is not only a wide-ranging, far-reaching meditation on the meaning and experience of motherhood that draws from the disciplines of anthropology, feminist theory, psychology, and literature, but it also narrates Rich's personal reflections on her experiences of mothering. Andrea O'Reilly gathers feminist scholars from diverse disciplines such as literature, women's studies, law, sociology, anthropology, creative writing, and critical theory and examines how Of Woman Born has informed and influenced the way feminist scholarship "thinks and talks" about motherhood. The contributors explore the many ways in which Rich provides the analytical tools to study and report upon the meaning and experience of motherhood.

Download or read book A Mercy written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-08-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . . At the novel's heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

Download or read book Mother Wit written by Malaika B. Horne, PhD and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-04 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mother Wit By: Malaika B. Horne, PhD “This book describes in a vivid and poignant manner the remarkable ability of a mid-twentieth century Black woman—living under conditions of Apartheid as practiced in the United States—to overcome harsh and even grotesque societal obstacles, and succeed in rearing six children. That each of them went on to excel in their chosen fields is worthy of serious contemplation. In addition, the reader is provided insight and illumination on still taboo topics such as “colorism” and intra-group violence that engender and nourish self-hate among many in the African American Community. Moreover, the author’s penchant for candor is coupled with a constructive theme of hope and faith in the future.” ~~William M Harvey, PhD, psychologist “This is not just an evocative, at times heart-rending, portrait of an African-American mother but, as well, a colorful depiction of a Mississippi cum St. Louis family grappling with Jim Crow. In well written prose worthy of a cinema production, this book is an instant classic meriting a place on the top shelf alongside Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Richard Wright.” ~~Gerald Charles Horne, PhD, University of Houston “A moving tribute to a devoted mother whose determination, dedication and strong character allowed her family to breach barriers of race, class and economic want to achieve measurable success. Dr. Horne’s story of a loving mother with a keen intelligence who sacrificed all for her children is touching, inspiring and above all, instructive.” ~~Gwen Moore, curator, Missouri History Museum “Mother Wit is a love letter, first to Horne’s visionary mother Flora and then to the story of imperfect people making their way, together, in an even more horribly imperfect world. This is a story of color, of cruelty, of family and of coming to understand. Horne has written the kind of family history that tells the reader much more than the surface of the story. The lives of her characters, family members across several generations, are built upon the context of racism and all the byproducts thereof. Reading their stories and seeing the strength of Flora and the children she raised, is testament to tenacity and hope.” ~~Faith Sandler, executive director, Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis “Blessed is the mother who inspires her children to have aspirations and shows them the necessary steps to take to make those aspirations a reality. Malaika B. Horne writes, with a captivating style about such a mother, detailing the complex journey to attain seemingly simple goals, with clarity and forthrightness.” ~~Blanche M. Touhill, PhD, chancellor emerita, University of Missouri-St. Louis

Download or read book Mother Without Child written by Elaine Tuttle Hansen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a conceptually innovative book which expands the meaning of motherhood to include mothers 'without child'; it is also a compassionate political book which refuses the boundary between 'good enough' and 'bad' mothers. Mother Without Child is an engaging, witty, and provocative literary study which should fascinate anyone who is interested in mothering or in looking for new ways to talk about motherhood without erasing some women's experience or dividing mothers from each other."--Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace "Hansen positions her study in a genuinely new space . . . taboo ground, which demands not only a great deal of courage to address, but also enormous intelligence and insight. Hansen is up to this task. . . hers is a pioneer study that will have a significant impact on the ways that non-procreative motherhood is discussed and understood." --Madelon Sprengnether, author of The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis "Since the beginnings of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, feminist scholars have been obsessed with motherhood. Mother Without Child takes us to the next stage in this fascinated and fascinating exploration. Through illuminating readings of contemporary stories of thwarted motherhood, Hansen challenges the persistent and constraining definitions of the good and even the good-enough mother. She enjoins us to listen to the moving, devastating, and often inspiring stories of mothers who survive the loss of their children and she urges us to find there not the angry voices of feminist daughters who cannot forgive their patriarchal mothers, but alternative stories of a different maternity that can lead us to alternative plots and visions of women's lives. We need this book."--Marianne Hirsch, author of The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism "A careful, committed, and freshly clarifying voice. Hansen's graceful prose and finely interwoven explorations are much needed at this time. Through readings of contemporary fiction, she enriches our vocabulary for discussing the overdetermined topic of motherhood and deepens our understanding of both its psychological and contemporary political dimensions. Mother Without Child is a book for historians and social scientists as well as literary scholars."--Laura Doyle, author of Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture

Download or read book Mothers Mothering and Motherhood Across Cultural Differences A Reader written by Andrea O'Reilly and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood across Cultural Differences, the first-ever Reader on the subject matter, examines the meaning and practice of mothering/motherhood from a multitude of maternal perspectives. The Reader includes 22 chapters on the following maternal identities: Aboriginal, Adoptive, At-Home, Birth, Black, Disabled, East-Asian, Feminist, Immigrant/Refuge, Latina/Chicana, Poor/Low Income, Migrant, Non-Residential, Older, Queer, Rural, Single, South-Asian, Stepmothers, Working, Young Mothers, and Mothers of Adult Children. Each chapter provides background and context, examines the challenges and possibilities of mothering/motherhood for each group of mothers and considers directions for future research. The first anthology to provide a comprehensive examination of mothers/mothering/ motherhood across diverse cultural locations and subject positions, the book is essential reading for maternal scholars and activists and serves as an ideal course text for a wide range of courses in Motherhood Studies.

Download or read book Sula written by Toni Morrison and published by Paw Prints. This book was released on 2008-11-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intense friendship shared by two black women raised in an Ohio town changes when one of them leaves to roam the countryside and returns ten years later.

Download or read book Know the Mother written by Desiree Cooper and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-14 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short, searing glimpses of how race and gender shadow even the most intimate moments of women’s lives. While a mother can be defined as a creator, a nurturer, a protector—at the center of each mother is an individual who is attempting to manage her own fears, desires, and responsibilities in different and sometimes unexpected ways. In Know the Mother, author Desiree Cooper explores the complex archetype of the mother in all of her incarnations. In a collage of meditative stories, women—both black and white—find themselves wedged between their own yearnings and their roles as daughters, sisters, grandmothers, and wives. In this heart-wrenching collection, Cooper reveals that gender and race are often unanticipated interlopers in family life. An anxious mother reflects on her prenatal fantasies of suicide while waiting for her daughter to come home late one night. A lawyer miscarries during a conference call and must proceed as though nothing has happened. On a rare night out with her husband, a new mother tries convincing herself that everything is still the same. A politician's wife's thoughts turn to slavery as she contemplates her own escape: "Even Harriet Tubman had realized that freedom wasn't worth the price of abandoning her family, so she'd come back home. She'd risked it all for love." With her lyrical and carefully crafted prose, Cooper's stories provide truths without sermon and invite empathy without sentimentality. Know the Mother explores the intersection of race and gender in vignettes that pull you in and then are gone in an instant. Readers of short fiction will appreciate this deeply felt collection.

Download or read book Jazz written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-07-24 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author. “As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —Glamour In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People). "The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to Black women.” —The New York Times Book Review

Download or read book Beloved written by Toni Morrison and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

Download or read book God Help the Child written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A New York Times Notable Book • This fiery and provocative novel from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride’s mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that “what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.” “Powerful.... A tale that is as forceful as it is affecting, as fierce as it is resonant.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Download or read book Of Woman Born Motherhood as Experience and Institution written by Adrienne Rich and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pathbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation. In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A “powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection” (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionized how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning writer Eula Biss, the book resounds with as much wisdom and insight today as when it was first written.