This first systematic study of mother-daughter relationships as represented in Western European fiction during the second half of the 20th century provides a comparative study of works from England, France, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. For each individual body of texts, the authors i
Über den Autor
nAdalgisa Giorgio is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Bath.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
nAcknowledgements
n
nChapter 1. Mothers and Daughters in Western Europe: Mapping the Territory
nA. Giorgio
n
nChapter 2. Writing the Mother-Daughter Relationship: Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Literary Criticism
nA. Giorgio
n
nChapter 3. Towards a Female Symbolic: Re-Presenting Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Spanish Narrative by Women
nC. Arkinstall
n
nChapter 4. 'The Horror of the Unlived Life': Mother-Daughter Relationships in Contemporary Irish Women's Fiction
nA. Fogarty
n
nChapter 5. The Passion for the Mother: Conflicts and Idealisations in Contemporary Italian Narrative by Women
nA. Giorgio
n
nChapter 6. Writing Mother-Daughter Relationality in the French Context
nAlex Hughes
n
nChapter 7. Bad Daughters and Unmotherly Mothers: The New Family Plot in the Contemporary English Novel
nP. Splendore
n
nChapter 8. Power and Powerlessness: Mothers and Daughters in Postwar German and Austrian Literature
nC. Weedon
n
nNotes on Contributors
nIndex
Klappentext
The psychoanalytic discovery of the importance of the pre-oedipal mother-daughter bond in the 1970s generated a vast amount of feminist theory attempting to identify the specificity of, and give value to, the daughter's relationship to her mother. At the same time women writers engaged in the complex task of representing this highly conflictual relationship which had been largely absent in women's narrative until then. Although much criticism has been written on individual texts, no systematic study of the development of this theme in Western European fiction exists.nThis book offers the first comparative assessment of the subject-matter in England, France, Germany and Austria, Ireland, Italy, and Spain in the second half of last century. The six main chapters explore the interplay between narrative strategies, psychic structures, and socio-political and cultural processes in the textual representation of the relationship in each country, thus providing original interpretations both of classic texts by established writers and of more recent narratives by new or emerging authors. Among the writers featured are Steedman, Diski, Winterson, Tennant, de Beauvoir, Leduc, Djura, Wolf, Jelinek, Mitgutsch, Novak, Lavin, O'Brien, O'Faol¿in, Morante, Sanvitale, Ramondino, Chacel, Rodoreda, Mart¿n Gaite.
