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Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal

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Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal Synopsis

Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother, Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal proposes a new interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through this maternal relation, their writing appears as the product of an "anxiety" rising not from paternal influence, but from the violence done to their mother in their attempts at self-creation through writing. In order to bring to light this modernist violence, this study analyzes these authors in tandem with Derrida’s work on the gender-specific violence of the Western philosophical and literary tradition. The book demonstrates how these writer-sons wrote their works in a constant crisis vis-à-vis the mother’s body as site of both origin and dissolution. It proves how, if modernism was first established as a patrilineal heritage, it was ultimately written on the bodies of women and mothers, confusing them in order to appropriate their generative traits.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9781032091778
Publication date: 30th June 2021
Author: James Martell
Publisher: Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis Ltd
Format: Paperback
Pagination: 188 pages
Series: Among the Victorians and Modernists
Genres: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900
Feminism and feminist theory
Literary theory