Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Re-Envisioning the Freudian Mother in Southern Literature

Re-Envisioning the Freudian Mother in Southern Literature

Goad, Jill

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1666969982
ISBN13: 9781666969986
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Jan 8 2026
Pages: 162
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Through the lens of a feminist psychoanalytic framework, Re-Envisioning the Freudian Mother in Southern Literature re-evaluates the mother-child dynamic as one far more complicated than what is present in typical psychoanalytic readings.

Under this framework, Jill Goad explores the figure of the mother through Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, William Faulkner's Light in August, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples, Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard and other poems, and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing. The author argues that the Freudian concept of castration occurring at birth rather than a child's early years, contrasting the Freudian-influenced theorists dominate the notion of psychoanalysis in literature. Goad's approach to analyzing mothers and the consequences of birth classifies mother figures as powerful and complex instead of weak, frightening, or two-dimensional. Re-Envisioning the Freudian Mother in Southern Literature encourages a complete re-evaluation of the mother as one who gives birth to selfhood and subjectivity as opposed to a lack of agency.

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