Moms, Memories, Materialities: Sons Write Their Mothers’ Bodies
Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: This essay investigates representations of working-class mothers—particularly aging, ill, and dying maternal bodies—in novels by middle-class sons (Mustafa Can, Peter Handberg, and Peter Sandström). Unlike patrifocal narratives, filial life writing about mothers is typically not written to recover a parent who has been absent, but to re(dis)cover one who has always been present. The novels offer a space for thinking through motherhood and sonhood as relational, embodied experience, and for reconsidering the interplay between gender and perspective in life writing as well as in cultural criticism.
Source: a/b Auto/Biography Studies
Author: Helena Wahlström Henriksson
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W3048839463