Modernism Selfcreation And The Maternal The Mothers Son Among The Victorians And Modernists 1st Edition James Martell by James Martell 9780367191696, 9780429200861, 0367191695, 0429200862 instant download after payment.

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.