Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
28
result(s) for
"Miscarriage Fiction."
Sort by:
The storyteller's secret : a novel
Nothing prepares Jaya, A New York journalist, for the heartbreak of her third miscarriage and the slow unraveling of her marriage in its wake. Desperate to assuage her deep anguish, she decides to go to India to uncover answers to her family's past. Intoxicated by the sights, smells, and sounds she experiences, Jaya becomes an eager student of the culture. But it is Ravi -- her grandmother's former servant and trusted confidant -- who reveals the resilience, struggles, secret love, and tragic fall of Jaya's pioneering grandmother during the British occupation. Through her courageous grandmother's arrestingly romantic and heart-wrenching story, Jaya discovers the legacy bequeathed to her and a strength that, until now, she never knew was possible. -- from book jacket.
Book
Reconceiving Victorian Pregnancy and Childbirth: A Case Study of Ellen Wood's East Lynne and Lord Oakburn's Daughters
Focusing on East Lynne (1860–61) and Lord Oakburn's Daughters (1864) and referring to Victorian advice manuals for pregnant women, this article argues that Ellen Wood centered pregnancy and childbirth as critical experiences of women's lives. In East Lynne, Isabel gives birth to her first child in a difficult labor that nearly kills her; her future adultery originates in the lying-in room; and the final section heightens Isabel's torture as she witnesses Barbara's second pregnancy. Lord Oakburn's Daughters reuses elements of East Lynne while intensifying its focus on pregnancy, postpartum vulnerability, and lying in. The novel opens with an explicit childbirth scene; its murder plot is set in the lying-in room; and its central metonym, a locket, stands for women's bonds established during childbirth. While pregnancy and childbirth are thought to have remained largely unrepresented in Victorian fiction, both novels use contemporary vocabulary and codes to represent these experiences. Moreover, Wood created her particular brand of gestational sensation by featuring women in white as figures of maternal loss, longing, and postpartum trauma. Studying these novels thus not only provides evidence of how Wood represented pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal feeling but also models a narratological method for analyzing such representations in mid-Victorian fiction generally.
Journal Article
‘Creative Ferment’: abortion and reproductive agency in Bessie Head’s Personal Choices trilogy
Using original archival research from Amazwi South African Museum of Literature, this article examines representations of abortion in three novels by Bessie Head: When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971) and A Question of Power (1973). I argue that Bessie Head documents both changing attitudes to terminations of pregnancy and dramatic environmental, medical, and sociopolitical developments during southern Africa’s liberation struggles. Furthermore, her fictional writing queers materialism and its traditionally gender-dichotomous origins, presenting an understanding of development which exceeds temporal or national boundaries. Her treatment of human reproduction in both tangible and figurative terms disrupts teleological definitions of exile: separation and loss, rendered through literal and metaphorical abortions, are seen as inherently vital processes for gaining agency in post/colonial southern Africa. Instead of using discourse from contemporary debates about freedom and choice, which are often polarised, I use the term ‘reproductive agency’ to refer to a continuum of ethical presentness, rooted in considering women’s desires. My literary analysis explicitly concentrates on Head’s biological imagery of growth and separation and how this ruptures repronormative discourse underpinning colonial expansion in southern Africa. I refer to Head’s ethical outlook as a critical form of humanism. My understanding of critical humanism differs from humanism proper in that it relies on queer associations: both queerness as strangeness, and queerness as resistance to categorisation (much like Head’s critiques of essentialist national identities). Adapting new materialist theories with postcolonial scholarship, I coin the term ‘queer vitality’ to argue that abortion involves both tragedy and desire, and that southern African feminist fiction functions as postcolonial theory when the concept of reproductive agency is understood to encompass both individual and collective desires. In Head’s words, in her creative worlds, abortion does not signal the ending of a life, but rather a plethora of new possibilities.
Journal Article
Abortion in the Fiction of Laclos, Rousseau, Isabelle de Charrière, Montesquieu
Eighteenth-century French fiction containing episodes on abortion are influenced by the seventeenth-century scandal of La Voisin, and by the 1731 legal suit involving the Jesuit Priest Père Girard and Catherine Cadière. Two observations may be derived from eighteenth-century French novels: women's abortions are monitored, instigated, and decided by fathers, husbands and lovers, who select for them, if they are to remain celibate, and whose children they bear. And as well, abortion tests or reveals the limits of a woman’s individual freedom and right to care for herself.
Journal Article
Failed Futurity: Performing Abortion in Merrill Denison's Marsh Hay
First published in a collection of four plays entitled The Unheroic North (1923), Marsh Hay was described by book reviewers as \"the most serious and ambitious\" play in the collection (\"Life and Letters\" 22).[...]the Blue Books equate children with the nation as well as with futurity: \"When children come you know that your home will not pass away with your generation.[...]the physical absence of the pregnant Sarilin onstage calls attention to the absence of the motherto-be's voice and agency.[...]of the characters' self-imposed stagnation, the repetition of the messy homestead, tumultuous family, and rebellious daughter elicit reviewers' exasperation rather than their sympathy.
Journal Article
Writing the Pregnant Body in Marie Darrieussecq’s Le Pays (2005)
In the early 1990s, a number of commercially and critically successful French writers began examining the lived experiences of the female reproductive body, tapping them for both creative inspiration and critical reflection, while expressing them through the voice of the reproductive subject. Previously, narratives of reproduction recounted from the first-person narrator’s perspective had been few in French fiction and works centrally concerned with these experiences were rare. This paper first identifies some key works within this ever-growing corpus that I refer to as “hysterographies” (writings of the womb). With this term, I unite first-person narratives that capture women’s perceptions of their bodies during reproductive or sterile experiences as they innovate, reflect on their writing, and engage with the contemporary medical establishment. The authors engaging in such works include quite recognizable names from Marie Redonnet, Christine Angot, and Louise Lambrichs to Justine Lévy, Marie NDiaye, and Annie Ernaux—just to name a few. Next, this paper takes a closer look at the narrative techniques and formal experimentation that one hysterography, Marie Darrieussecq’s
Le Pays
(
2005
), employs to articulate the experiences of the narrator’s shifting relationship to her pregnant body. Structurally, the narrative is recounted from two alternating perspectives—one in the third-person observing the protagonist’s life (external focalization), and the other in first-person interior monologue (internal focalization) visually illustrated with boldface print. The two layers of this work intertwine and diverge exposing a variety of relationships between the body and the world in which it lives. Darrieussecq uses the consistent alternation of these points of view, combined with an innovative fusion of genres highlighting sounds (poetic couplets, transcribed music, onomatopoeia), to communicate the experience of pregnancy. Just as a sonogram reveals a fetus, the two perspectives project sounds that chart both an inner and outer geography of the pregnant body, while exploring its experiences and (pro)creative possibilities.
Journal Article
Constructing imaginary narratives
The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of multi-disciplinary, practice-led research in creative writing as a form of knowledge making in qualitative research. The author uses her own writing, especially the novel Swimming (Vanark Press, 2009), which is situated in the broader context of feminist fiction writing, as a subversive feminist project that aims to intervene in and challenge the dominant narratives of what it means to be a woman, by creating \"alternative figurations\" of \"woman\" which highlight differences among women and enhance our understanding of \"woman\" as a complex and multiple subject always \"in process\". By using her own practice of fiction writing and research as a case study, the author explores the ways that constructing an imagined narrative -- in this case a novel - can make a contribution to knowledge and raise questions about representation, truth and subjectivity.
Journal Article
Constructing imaginary narratives
Purpose - Deleuze and Guattari have argued that in art, including literature, the senses get hold of the world in a non-conceptual or \"sensational\" way, adding \"new varieties\" that can lead to new ways of knowing and seeing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of multi-disciplinary, practice-led research in creative writing as a form of knowledge making in qualitative research.Design methodology approach - The author uses her own writing, especially the novel Swimming (Vanark Press, 2009), which is situated in the broader context of feminist fiction writing, as a subversive feminist project that aims to intervene in and challenge the dominant narratives of what it means to be a woman, by creating \"alternative figurations\" of \"woman\" which highlight differences among women and enhance our understanding of \"woman\" as a complex and multiple subject always \"in process\".Findings - By using her own practice of fiction writing and research as a case study, the author explores the ways that constructing an imagined narrative - in this case a novel - can make a contribution to knowledge and raise questions about representation, truth and subjectivity.Originality value - In this paper, through a few examples from her novel, the author's aim has been to write a narrative of the process, of \"material thinking\" that led to the final work.
Journal Article