y separately published work icon Nurturing Ideology : Representations of Motherhood in Contemporary Australian Adolescent Fiction single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2000... 2000 Nurturing Ideology : Representations of Motherhood in Contemporary Australian Adolescent Fiction
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

This study analyses the ways in which motherhood is represented in a corpus of contemporary, critically acclaimed Australian adolescent fiction. The 18 texts in the research corpus were those short-listed by the Children's Book Council of Australia for its annual Book of the Year: Older Readers award in the years 1992 to 1994 inclusive. The publicity, prestige and power attached to these awards means that short-listed books, taken to be 'good' books for children and adolescents, are often used as educational resources in Australian schools, particularly to support teaching and learning activities in literacy and English education. Recognising adolescent fiction as a potentially significant site of contestation over the social justice ideals that inform Australia's national curriculum documents, the study sought to document the ways in which these texts are implicated in the production and reproduction of ideologies of motherhood.
(Source: Author's abstract .)

Notes

  • Griffith University. School of Cognition, Language and Special Education. Thesis (Ph.D.), 2000.

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First known date: 2000
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Related Works

Representations of the 'Absent Mother' in Australian Adolescent Fiction Diana Beere , 1998 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , December vol. 8 no. 3 1998; (p. 16-24) Beere analyses the ways in which the 'absent mother' is represented in the novel Galax-Arena and the short story 'Andrew', from the collection, Love Me, Love Me Not. (These monograph titles were shortlisted for the Children's Book Council Book of the Year Awards in 1992 and 1993 respectively). Beer's argument is that in recent fictions for children and adolescents, representations of the 'absent mother' continue to maintain and support dominant patrirachal constructions of motherhood which fundamentally categorize women within a rigid dualistic system of signification. Beere's reading of Galax-Arena looks at how literal and metaphorical representations of the absent mother - ie. contemporary society as 'bad parent' (19), are closely associated with biological femininity. By contrast, she argues that the short story 'Andrew' offers a more positive representation which challenges prevailing ideologies of motherhood that construct 'absent mothers' as only a negative force in the lives of children (22). Despite signs of resistance in some narratives, Beere concludes that the either/or subject positioning of women as good mothers or bad mothers is part of the post-feminist 'backlash' (22), which continues 'to limit the range of legitimate identities available to women and girls and hence to undermine the achievements of contemporary feminist movements' (17). She ends her critique by questioning the implications of 'conventional normative versions of motherhood' in relation to the judging of children's literature and the awards merited by the Children's Book Council of Australia.
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