Copyright
Muireann Maguire. Copyright of individual chapters are maintained by the chapter author(s).ISBN
Language
- English
THEMA
- DS
- JBSF1
BISAC
- LIT004110
- LIT003000
- LIT004290
- SOC028000
Keywords
- Motherhood
- Eastern European literature
- Maternal studies
- Women’s writing
- Feminist literary criticism
White Ink, Red Flag
Expressing Motherhood In Eastern European Literature and Culture
White Ink, Red Flag explores motherhood as lived experience, as a literary subject and as a political issue across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet sphere.
Combining original scholarship with newly translated fiction, poetry and memoir, the volume traces maternal experience through pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, miscarriage, grief, ambivalence and non-normative motherhood. Its contributors examine how writers from Croatia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and beyond confront the pressures placed on mothers by society, ideology and the state.
Set against the legacies of socialism and the transformations of the post-socialist era, these essays reveal motherhood as a site of conflict, memory, resistance and reinvention. The accompanying translations, specially commissioned for this volume, introduce Anglophone readers to diverse glimpses of Eastern European motherhood including a home birth among Russian peasants, maternal care in mid-century Latvia, maternal grief in contemporary Poland, and adoption in Lithuania.
Read together, the scholarly and creative texts challenge idealised visions of maternity and show how writing about mothers can reshape how we think about gender, belonging, and national identity.This volume will appeal to readers of Eastern European literature, gender studies, maternal studies, translation studies and comparative literature.
Contributors
Muireann Maguire
(editor)Muireann Maguire is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. She is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded RusTrans project as well as for the AHRC-funded Slavic and East European Maternal Studies Research Network (SEEMS, funded Aug 2021-Oct 2022) which has inspired the current book proposal. She has previously published articles on the representation of Russian motherhood in literature in Modern Languages Open (‘Dostoevsky and the Politics of Parturition’, 1:1 (2014)) and the Slavonic and East European Review (‘Dostoevsky’s Forgotten Children: Lost Babies and Baby Loss in The Adolescent’, SEER 99:1 (2020)); her article on breastfeeding in Russian literature, “A hitherto unheard-of and harmful thing”: Breastfeeding and Violence in Russian Literature' was published in the Russian Review, 82:3 (2023). Under the auspices of SEEMS, among other academic and outreach activities, she has organized two international conferences (the online ‘Radiant Maternity’ in January 2022 and the in-person ‘White Ink, Red Flag’ July 2022 respectively). Her previous monograph was Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature (Peter Lang, 2012) and Invading the American Canon: Translators of Russian Literary Fiction, 1863-1984 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). With Timothy Langen, she previously co-edited and contributed to the Open Book volume, Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature (2021).