Call for Book Chapters: Motherhood and Its Cultural Artifacts in American Literature

Vernon Press invites submissions for the edited volume "Motherhood and Its Cultural Artifacts in American Literature."

Before one becomes a mother in twenty-first-century America, cultural artifacts often appear as gifts or hand-me-downs to prepare the way. Traditional artifacts made in or around homes, like handmade quilts or blankets and sewn or hewn toys, may be presented to an expectant mother before an adoption or a birth, or hover in the periphery like guideposts directing a resistant individual down Maternity Road. Other artifacts get less attention, as Maggie Nelson wryly observes about breast pumps in The Argonauts, though they, too, exchange hands and expectations. American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries documents the many objects that move from public celebrations to individual arms and private rooms (and vice versa). It can also trace the cultural values that cling to these objects and move with them or show the unacknowledged work these artifacts perform on humans.

Possible topics

This collection seeks essays that recognize some hitherto unacknowledged relationship between American motherhood and its cultural objects—such as blankets, toys, herbal preparations, foodways, maternity wear, smocks, bottles, repressed languages, or songs—in recent American literature. Essays might respond to the questions below or answer alternative lines of inquiry.

• How might characters forced into motherhood or denied it negotiate their emotions through cultural artifacts?

• Where might artifacts stand in for the mother, or perhaps reinterpret or replace her/them?

• Do characters amplify their own individual mothering ethic through such objects without allowing the objects to essentialize mothering or mothers?

• What is the nature of the quality and duration of ties between those who inherit an object? To what extent do they circulate the object, and to what degree does the object actively navigate human channels?

• Where do authors present human mothers nurturing non-human animals (or vice-versa), and what materials mark these relationships or are brought into play?

• In what ways do plants, stones or beads, geological features, or microorganisms act in material ways on mothers in American literature or aid mothers in mothering?

Submission guidelines

Please send a biography and an abstract of approximately 350 words by July 25, 2025, to the email below.

Applicants can expect to receive decisions on abstracts by the end of August 2025 and to submit completed chapters by January 19, 2026.

Collection Editor: Wendy Whelan-Stewart, McNeese State University

Contact Email: wwhelanstewart@mcneese.edu