Mothers, Mobility, Narrative - Maternality in Us Literature

Shows how US literary representations of mothering across racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ communities challenge ideological prescriptions about motherhood and maternal love.
Mothers, Mobility, Narrative pairs women-identified writers whose work illuminates a range of maternal practices in the face of egregious structural inequalities and obstacles. By using the critical lens of maternal feminism, alongside recent theories of time, space, and memory, Mary Jo Bona reengages the field of motherhood studies to explore linkages between motherhood and movement. Across genres, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Kym Ragusa, Carole Maso, Cristina García, and Rebecca Makkai develop maternal figures who, in battling against institutional oppressions in eras of slavocracy, colonialism, dictatorship, and pandemic, expose the fundamentally intersectional nature of social categorization and disrupt traditional discourses of the maternal. Mothers, Mobility, Narrative rethinks maternality across a century and a half of literary expression in the United States, compelling readers to embrace more capacious understandings of maternal subjectivity, care, and kinship.

About the author

Mary Jo Bona is Distinguished SUNY Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Among her many books, she is the author of By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America and coeditor, with Irma Maini, of Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates, also by SUNY Press.

Product details

• Authors: Mary Jo Bona, Mary Jo (Distinguished Professor Emerita Bona, Bona Mary Jo
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 02.11.2025
• EAN: 9798855801996
• ISBN: 9798855801996
• No. of pages: 250
• Series: SUNY series in Multiethnic Literatures
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; USA, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Women Authors, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / General, United States of America, USA, Literary studies: general, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American & Black, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / Hispanic & Latino