232 pages / 5.50 x 8.50 inches / no illustrations
Southern Mothers, a collection of critical essays by prominent southern literary scholars, examines the significance of motherhood in southern fiction. The belle, the mammy, religion, and racism are several of the distinctive threads with which southern women writers have woven the fabric of their stories. Bringing southern motherhood into focus—with all its peculiarities of attitude and tradition—the essays speak to both the established and the unconventional modes of motherhood that are typical in southern writing and probe the extent to which southern women writers have rejected or embraced, supported or challenged the individual, social, and cultural understanding and institution of motherhood.
Sally Wolff is senior editor at the Emory Clinic and teaches "Literature and Medicine" in the Emory University School of Medicine. She also served as assistant vice president and associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, where she taught for over thirty years in the Department of English. She is the author of Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Plantation Diary and Talking about William Faulkner, and co-editor of Southern Mothers: Fact and Fiction in Southern Women’s Writing, and Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities and director of the Institute for Women’s Studies at Emory University. She is the author of many books, including Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South and Feminism and Its Illusions: A Critique of Individualism.Found an Error? Tell us about it.
