Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Maternal Literatures in Text and Tradition: Daughter-Centric, Matrilineal, and Matrifocal Perspectives -- Part 1: Maternal Absence -- 1. Aberrant, Absent, Alienated: Reading the Maternal in Jane Urquhart's First Two Novels, The Whirlpool and Changing Heaven -- 2. Motherless Daughters: The Absent Mothers in Margaret Atwood -- 3. Writing about Abusive Mothers: Ethics and Auto/biography -- 4. "Red Mother": The Missing Mother Plot as Double Mystery in Louise Erdrich's Fiction -- 5. "This was her punishment": Jew, Whore, Mother in the Fiction of Adele Wiseman and Lilian Nattel -- Part 2: Maternal Ambivalence -- 6. Eden Robinson's "Dogs in Winter": Parodic Extremes of Mothering -- 7. Subverting the Saintly Mother: The Novels of Gabrielle Poulin -- 8. "Opaque with confusion and shame": Maternal Ambivalence in Rita Dove's Poetry -- 9. Maternal Blitz: Harriet Lovatt as Postpartum Sufferer in Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child -- 10. We Need to Talk about Gender: Mothering and Masculinity in Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin -- Part 3: Maternal Agency -- 11. Narrating Maternal Subjectivity: Memoirs from Motherhood -- 12. The Motherhood Memoir and the "New Momism": Biting the Hand That Feeds You -- 13. "I had to make a future, willful, voluble, lascivious": Minnie Bruce Pratt's Disruptive Lesbian Maternal Narratives -- 14. Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature -- 15. But She's a Mom! Sex, Motherhood, and the Poetry of Sharon Olds -- 16. (Grand)mothering "Children of the Apocalypse": A Post-postmodern Ecopoetic Reading of Margaret Laurence's The Diviners -- Part 4: Maternal Communication -- 17. Colonialism's Impact on Mothering: Jamaica Kincaid's Rendering of the Mother-Daughter Split in Annie John -- 18. Mother to Daughter: Muted Maternal Feminism in the Fiction of Sandra Cisneros.

19. Cracking (Mother) India -- 20. Asian American Mothering in the Absence of Talk Story: Obasan and Chorus of Mushrooms -- 21. Baby, Boo-Boo, and Bobs: The Matrilineal Auto/biographies of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, and Eleanor Lanahan -- 22. Revelations and Representations: Birth Stories and Motherhood on the Internet -- Coda: "Stories to Live By": Maternal Literatures and Motherhood Studies -- Notes on the Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.