Overview
- Includes an appendix of creative contributions from reflections to multimedia projects on miscarriage, IVF, and childlessness
- Examines the emotional consequences of reproductive technologies through the lens of trauma studies
- Draws from a transnational corpus across five continents contributing to motherhood studies
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Pregnancy, Childbirth and Trauma
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Front Matter
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Trauma and Disrupted Mother-Child Bonds
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Front Matter
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New Challenges with ART
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture repositions motherhood studies through the lens of trauma theory by exploring new challenges surrounding conception, pregnancy, and postpartum experiences. Chapters investigate nine case studies of motherhood trauma and recovery in literature and culture from the last twenty years by exploring their emotional consequences through the lens of trauma, resilience, and “working through” theories. Contributions engage with a transnational corpus drawn from the five continents and span topics as rarely discussed as pregnancy denial, surrogacy, voluntary or involuntary childlessness, racism and motherhood, carceral mothering practices, surrogacy, IVF, artificial wombs, and mothering through war, genocide, and migration. Accompanied by an online creative supplement, this volume deals with silenced aspects of embodied motherhood while enhancing a better understanding of the cathartic effects of storytelling.
Reviews
“A smart, innovative, and robust collection that offers a unique and important contribution to Motherhood Studies in its emphasis on trauma, in linking and interfacing Trauma and Motherhood Studies; as well as in its interdisciplinary and transnational context. As noted in the introduction this collection is the first to focus specifically on trauma and motherhood; an important and emergent subfield of motherhood studies and one yet to be represented or developed through an edited collection. In this, the book is original, timely, and significant.”
—Andrea O’Reilly, Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, York University, Canada, and author of Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice; The 2nd Edition (2021))
“This volume breaks new ground by using trauma studies to shed light on certain less-studied experiences of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. The various contributions raise important questions about how literature, documentary film, and other cultural forms can make traumatic maternal experiences more visible—and how, in some cases, they can offer a path towards healing.”
—Valerie Heffernan, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Head of the Maynooth University School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Ireland)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Laura Lazzari is a Scientific Collaborator at the Sasso Corbaro Foundation for the Medical Humanities, Switzerland, and a Research Scholar at the Catholic University of America, USA. She specializes in Motherhood Studies and the Medical Humanities and has published extensively on women’s writing in the Italian-speaking world.
Nathalie Ségeral is Lecturer in French at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Associate Professor of French at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, USA. She specializes in Holocaust, genocide, memory and feminist studies, trauma theory, and the Francophone South Pacific.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Editors: Laura Lazzari, Nathalie Ségeral
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77407-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-77406-6Published: 02 December 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-77409-7Published: 03 December 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-77407-3Published: 30 November 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 242
Topics: Contemporary Literature, Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Memory Studies