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The author examines motherhood and female self-realization in feminist discourse and Joyce Carol Oates's recent fiction. While the first and second wave of feminism repudiated motherhood, the third wave claimed the right to enjoy it. The present fourth wave is now reviving the reservations about motherhood of the first two waves. This book demonstrates how Oates's writing reflects these shifts and how Oates takes up and transforms feminist standpoints in her work without writing conventional feminist literature. Literary criticism has only marginally dealt with Oates's mother figures. Drawing on Gender Studies and, in particular, on the transnational relation between French and American feminism, this book fills this gap.
List of contents
Contents: Motherhood and self-realization in American feminism (first, second, third and fourth wave) - Transnational relation to French feminism - Joyce Carol Oates's fiction: I Lock My Door Upon Myself, The Rise of Life on Earth, Middle Age, Missing Mom, Mudwoman - Kate Chopin - Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Emma Goldman - Margaret Sanger - Virginia Woolf - Simone de Beauvoir - Betty Friedan - Alix Kates Shulman - Adrienne Rich - Rebecca Walker - Elisabeth Badinter.
About the author
Julia Hillenbrand studied American Studies and Book Studies in Mainz and Middlebury (USA). She completed her PhD at the Department of English and Linguistics of the University of Mainz.
