Mother
Autor Sarah Knotten Limba Engleză Paperback – 5 mar 2020
Cum a arătat experiența de a fi mamă de-a lungul secolelor, dincolo de marile evenimente politice care au ocupat paginile manualelor de istorie? Găsim în „Mother” un răspuns profund și necesar la această întrebare pe care istoricul Sarah Knott și-a adresat-o în momentul în care a rămas însărcinată. Suntem de părere că această lucrare reușește să umple un gol imens în istoriografia universală, aducând în lumină detaliile cotidiene ale îngrijirii unui copil, o sferă adesea trecută cu vederea în favoarea războaielor sau revoluțiilor. Descoperim aici o structură narativă hibridă: autoarea folosește arcul propriei experiențe — de la durerea pierderii unei sarcini până la primii pași ai copiilor săi — pentru a ancora cercetarea istorică în realitatea imediată. Tonul este cald, dar riguros, transformând documentele de arhivă, jurnalele vechi și scrisorile uitate în mărturii vii. De la suferința unei femei sclave în travaliu până la zâmbetul unei amante regale, cartea ne poartă printr-un spectru vast de trăiri umane. Pe același raft cu A Woman’s Work de Elinor Cleghorn, această lucrare se adresează părinților și cititorilor pasionați de istorie socială care caută să înțeleagă cum s-a transformat conceptul de maternitate de-a lungul timpului. Spre deosebire de alte studii strict teoretice, abordarea lui Knott este una viscerală, integrând perspectivele unor femei din medii diverse, precum muncitoarele din fabricile secolului trecut sau casnicele din suburbiile anilor '50. În contextul operei sale, dacă în Sensibility and the American Revolution autoarea analiza formarea sinelui în context politic, aici ea coboară privirea către cel mai intim și universal proces: cel de a deveni și de a fi mamă.
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Specificații
ISBN-10: 0241972744
Pagini: 352
Dimensiuni: 131 x 198 x 30 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Editura: Penguin
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom
De ce să citești această carte
Recomandăm această carte părinților care vor să înțeleagă că provocările lor nu sunt izolate, ci fac parte dintr-o istorie lungă și nuanțată. Cititorul câștigă o perspectivă eliberatoare asupra maternității, învățând că nu există un singur mod „corect” de a crește un copil, ci o adaptare continuă la contextul social. Este o lectură care transformă experiența personală într-o lecție de istorie vie, oferind validare emoțională și rigoare intelectuală.
Despre autor
Sarah Knott este profesor asociat de istorie la Indiana University și co-editor al volumului „Women, Gender, and Enlightenment”. Expertiza sa academică în domeniul istoriei de gen este dublată de o capacitate narativă remarcabilă, reușind să traducă cercetarea de arhivă într-un limbaj accesibil și plin de empatie. În lucrările sale, precum Sensibility and the American Revolution, Knott explorează transformările identității umane, o temă pe care o rafinează în „Mother” prin prisma experienței materne, oferind o voce femeilor ale căror povești au fost mult timp marginalizate de istoria oficială.
Notă biografică
Recenzii
A joy to read, borne of raw curiosity and intelligence, nurtured into the world to fill a gap in understanding.
Knott manages to combine scholarship with personal experience in a heartfelt and original way. Every mother-to-be should read it
A stunning book. Mother: An Unconventional History is a dextrous blend of autobiography and anthropology and social history, but above all love and a woman's desire to be a mother. It is riveting from beginning to end
Mother is a timely and fascinating investigation into one of the most overlooked and yet fundamental human experiences. Sarah Knott expertly weaves together a narrative that succeeds in being both intensely personal but also reassuringly historical.
Lyrically evocative and richly textured, Mother sets fragments of female lives over the last four centuries in Britain and North America within a narrative of Sarah Knott's own experiences to produce a remarkable history - exploratory, pointillist, and intensely personal - of what it is, and has been, to be a mother.
In this innovative, grippingly readable history, Sarah Knott has woven a scintillating tapestry of ideas and experiences across time. Mother is a moving and enlightening meditation on the most elemental, yet ceaselessly varied, of all human bonds.
A remarkable book. Sarah Knott weaves an intimate account of becoming a mother into a richly-documented history of maternity. Eloquent and evocative, this is a book to savour and share with anyone who loves great history-writing.
This fabulous book manages both to recreate what those extraordinary early months of motherhood are like, and make sense of them by placing them in history. Knott's diary of motherhood is poetic: she conveys that sense that time has stopped, that only the baby's reflux matters, the heightened power of smell, the loss of self. The historical anecdotes Knott provides are riveting, and open up new ways of understanding what motherhood can be. The pace of it all is perfect - slow, and focused,- just as growth has its own imperceptible rhythms. This is a new kind of history-writing. A truly original, inspiring book.
Fascinating and beautifully written. A book I will feverishly press on others - both as an exploration of unheard histories and as a companion to pregnancy and early motherhood
In this beautifully written book, Sarah Knott speaks from the vantage point of a mother and a historian. Full of stories ranging across time, space, and ethnicity, with imagery that touches all our senses, Mother captures the physicality and emotions of motherhood, so that even those of us who have never experienced it ourselves feel what it is like to get pregnant, give birth, and raise a child.
Which mother hasn't wondered how other mothers have managed, in different circumstances? Sarah Knott describes, for example, how a mother looked after her baby in a seventeenth-century East Anglian village; how another was a mistress of King Charles II; and a third was a slave on a North Carolina plantation. She has read through an extraordinary amount of rare diaries and letters, and then used her own sensitive imagination to bring these fragments to life. Each description is short, often only a page or two, so a mother who has just a few minutes to read before the next interruption can realistically hope to get to the end of one example, and then take that mother's situation with her, to think about, as she returns to her own. Sarah Knott had two children while she was researching and writing. Her examples are grouped in chronological order of her experience, but with unusual headings, such as 'Finding Out' that a woman is pregnant, 'Quickening', 'Damp Cloth', and 'The Middle of the Night'. The focus throughout is on mothers, and there is very little on how their babies are responding. But perhaps we readers are required to wake up some imagination of our own.
With the skill of a twenty-first-century mother juggling numerous professional and caring responsibilities, Sarah Knott's Mother expertly pulls off a delicate balancing act. Knott's poignant personal memoir of pregnancy, birth, feeding and beyond encapsulates its bloody, milky, hormonal immediacy, whilst, at the same time, she finds in each moment an echo of history, a thread situating her among women - their bodies, communities and cultural practices - across centuries and continents.
This lyrical book-one-third memoir, two-thirds history-guides us through centuries of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care. Knott stitches her personal story to vignettes from the past and shows us how everyday mothering differed in time and place. With stunning prose, she gives us the sensory shorn of the sentimental. A riveting read
An original and important account of a universal but neglected experience. Mother powerfully conveys the thrilling, bewildering, and fuzzy-headed atmosphere that surrounds pregnancy and childbirth, and offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of our mothering predecessors.
Descriere scurtă
When acclaimed historian Sarah Knott became pregnant, she asked herself this question. But accounts of motherhood are hard to find. For centuries, historians have concerned themselves with wars, politics and revolutions, not the everyday details of carrying and caring for a baby. Much to do with becoming a mother, past or present, is lost or forgotten.
Using the arc of her own experience, from miscarriage to the birth and early babyhood of her two children, and drawing on letters, diaries, court records and paintings, Sarah Knott explores the ever-changing experiences of maternity across the ages. From the labour pains felt by an enslaved woman to the triumphant smile of a royal mistress bearing a king's first son; from a 1950s suburban housewife to a working-class East Ender taking her baby to the factory; these lost stories of mothering create a moving depiction of an ever-changing human experience.
'A joy to read' New York Times
'Timely and fascinating' Amanda Foreman
'Utterly compelling' Financial Times
'Knott manages to combine scholarship with personal experience in a heartfelt and original way. Every mother-to-be should read it' Sunday Times
'Wonderful... This is history at its best: writing that unfolds the past and sheds light on the present' Financial Times
'A stunning book, riveting from beginning to end' Diane Atkinson, author of 'Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes'