Remembering Maternal Bodies: Melancholy in Latina and Latin American Women's Writing (New Directions in Latino American Cultures) - Hardcover

"Remembering Maternal Bodies provides a profound engagement with Latino and Latin American women writers. It invites the reader into a body of imaginative connections and lines of flight shared by writers generally not read in unison. Benigno Trigo significantly advances an exploration of a new corpus redefining literature and criticism in the Americas." - Roman de la Campa, Stony Brook University

"Drawing on insights from psychoanalytic, feminist and post-feminist thought, Trigo undertakes a thoughtful, provocative and strikingly original reflection on the inscription - and, at times, proscription - of the maternal body in contemporary Latin American and Latina writing. Remembering Maternal Bodies is certain to inspire lively debate. I know of no other book like it." - Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Columbia University

'Insightful and introspective study of maternal writing that tells us as much about the text as it does about ourselves. Trigo provides a highly analytical, patient, and perceptive counter reading to patriarchal narratives. In so doing, he convincingly links symbolic matricide in Latin American and Latina literatures..' William Luis, Vanderbilt University

"Trigo presents a compelling critical vision of a literary corpus that, through a rigorous and theoretically informed analysis of maternal themes, contributes significantly to existing definitions of Latin American and Latina women's writing." - Dara Goldman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"An important contribution to the fields of Latin American literary and Latina/o literary studies." - Laura Gutiérrez, University of Iowa

Remembering Maternal Bodies is a collection of essays about the writings of several Latina and Latin American women writers who remember their mothers, and/or challenge our commonly held beliefs about motherhood and maternity, in an effort to stop depression and melancholy. It suggests that the widespread violent depression and sometimes suicidal melancholy that haunts our culture and society is the result of a terrible fantasy about the way we become ourselves. This fantasy has a matricide at its core, and this matricide will continue to have its depressing effect on us as long as it remains in place and invisible. The authors showcased in this book make visible this fantasy and change it in their works in an effort to bring us out of our depression and melancholy.