1st Edition

Motherhood and Creativity in Contemporary Self-Life Writing Writers and Mothers

By Alice Braun Copyright 2025
    190 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book aims to study the representation of motherhood in self-life writing by English-speaking authors. It highlights the particular issues women writers are faced with when they try to combine their vocation as artists with their duties to their children. For those women who  claim their right to be both mothers and writers, several cultural myths need to be taken down, chief among which is the representations that we have of what being an artist should be like, as well as the role a mother should have towards her children. This book looks at self-life writing by women from English-speaking countries to reveal the common themes and tropes which recur in texts written on the subject of motherhood, by looking at them from both a literary and a cultural perspective. It also aims to demonstrate that a new generation of women writers is taking up the subject and forging a new literary tradition.

    Acknowledgments

     

    Introduction – A Sound-Proof Room of One’s Own

     

    Chapter 1 – The Impossible Subject

     

    Chapter 2 – To Have and Have Not

     

    Chapter 3 – On Pregnancy and Childbirth

     

    Chapter 4 – Mother Writing

     

    Chapter 5 – Bad Mothers

     

    Conclusion – Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater

     

    Index

    Biography

    Alice Braun is a senior lecturer at the Université de Paris Nanterre in France. She has been researching self-life writing by women and is the author of several articles on Janet Frame, Rachel Cusk, Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing. Lately she has been working on the representation of motherhood in literary texts, and particularly childbirth.