Impossible Motherhood:

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Impossible Motherhood: "
Jung, Seohyon Hofkosh, Sonia

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	1113715
Doc. No	:	TLpq2384767816
Main Entry	:	Hofkosh, Sonia
	:	Jung, Seohyon
Title & Author	:	Impossible Motherhood:\ Jung, SeohyonHofkosh, Sonia
College	:	Tufts University
Date	:	2020
student score	:	2020
Degree	:	Ph.D.
Page No	:	242
Abstract	:	Impossible Motherhood: Ruses of British Colonialism and Domestic Fiction reveals the mutually constitutive relationship between late eighteenth and early nineteenth century discourses of motherhood and the logic supporting British colonial practices around the globe. The figure of the bad mother operates as the key in my reading of a selection of novels written during this formative period of the British empire. Literary depictions of maternal failures bring into relief the expanding empire’s ideological and material conditions under which ideal motherhood emerges as a national virtue. My project contends that the self-contradictory and thus impossible ideal and the colonial modes of thinking reinforce each other by normalizing gendered exploitation. The discourse of ideal motherhood simultaneously enables the imperial mechanism and helps disguise the fundamental contradictions in its operation, as the ideal restrains female sexuality and sentimentalizes the value of reproductive labor. Fictional bad mothers challenge or disrupt the development of a sentimentalized domesticity and thereby also expose the colonial tensions that haunt the construction of the British home. Beyond describing a particular role or kinship relation, impossible motherhood encapsulates the political and economic ruses of colonialism that permeate British literature and culture during the decades around the turn into the nineteenth century.
Subject	:	British colonialism
	:	British culture
	:	Domestic fiction
	:	Eighteenth century British Literature
	:	Motherhood narratives
	:	Nineteenth century British Literature