Absent Mothers Research Articles

Women’s experience of perinatal support in a high migrant Australian population during the COVID-19 pandemic: a mixed methods study

BackgroundAs a COVID-19 risk mitigation measure, Australia closed its international borders for two years with significant socioeconomic disruption including impacting approximately 30% of the Australian population who are migrants. Migrant populations during the peripartum often rely on overseas relatives visiting for social support. High quality social support is known to lead to improved health outcomes with disruption to support a recognised health risk.AimTo explore women’s experience of peripartum social support during the COVID-19 pandemic in a high migrant population. To quantify type and frequency of support to identify characteristics of vulnerable perinatal populations for future pandemic preparedness.MethodsA mixed methods study with semi-structured interviews and a quantitative survey was conducted from October 2020 to April 2021. A thematic approach was used for analysis.ResultsThere were 24 participants interviewed both antenatally and postnatally (22 antenatal; 18 postnatal). Fourteen women were migrants and 10 Australian born. Main themes included; ‘Significant disruption and loss of peripartum support during the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing impact for migrant women’; ‘Husbands/partners filling the support gap’ and ‘Holding on by a virtual thread’. Half of the participants felt unsupported antenatally. For Australian born women, this dissipated postnatally, but migrants continued to feel unsupported. Migrant women discussed partners stepped into traditional roles and duties of absent mothers and mothers-in-law who were only available virtually.ConclusionThis study identified disrupted social support for migrant women during the pandemic, providing further evidence that the pandemic has disproportionately impacted migrant populations. However, the benefits identified in this study included high use of virtual support, which could be leveraged for improving clinical care in the present and in future pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted most women’s peripartum social support with migrant families having ongoing disruption. Gains in the pandemic included greater gender equity for domestic work as husbands/partners increased their contribution to domestic work and childcare.

Absent Mothers: A Folkloric Reading of the Exclusionary Practices of Writing IR's Canonical History

AbstractWomen's exclusion from the international relations (IR) canon has been widely documented, and many have undertaken to systematically address these exclusions. However, consideration of how women's exclusion is written into canonical texts is less well explored. This paper draws on folkloric approaches to understanding canon constitution to perform a close reading of disciplinary history texts. This paper considers these texts in parallel to Cinderella stories to understand the absence of “founding mothers” and illuminate how women's exclusion has been written into the canon as a natural absence. This paper builds on the growing literature about women's exclusion to document the specific ways in which how we write can reiterate exclusions within the canon. This is relevant to understanding these historical practices of exclusion and to reconsidering how we write the contemporary IR canon.

Of absent mothers, strong sisters and peculiar daughters: The constructional network of English NPN constructions

Abstract This paper analyzes symmetric NPN constructions (e.g., day to day, face to face, step by step) qualitatively and quantitatively by examining data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 570 million words, 1990–present. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). The constructions’ frequency and productivity, as well as their semantics and extension potential (i.e., modification, complementation) is investigated (e.g., by conducting collostructional analysis). In terms of theoretical modeling, the paper takes a Usage-based, Cognitive Construction Grammar approach (UCCxG) and sketches the constructional network of this constructional family, postulating various constructional templates on different levels of specificity – among others – the existence of the following subtypes [CNsg,time i after CNsg,time i]Cx (e.g., day after day, night after night), [CNsg,measurement i by CNsg,measurement i]Cx (e.g., inch by inch, step by step) or [CNsg,bodypart i to CNsg,bodypart i]Cx (e.g., skin to skin, shoulder to shoulder). We show how these templates are vertically and horizontally connected to each other. Ultimately, we argue that in a usage-based model which strives for cognitive plausibility it is not always feasible to postulate the entrenchment of an abstract overarching schema (i.e., a ‘mothernode’) like [CNi P CNi]Cx or even [N P N]Cx high up in the network. It is unlikely that speakers abstract such a general schema in a bottom-up acquisition process for this family. Rather, the NPN group is a constructional family characterized by many sister ties and by the absence of mother nodes from which information can be inherited.

Discourses in accounts of rape by sex offenders in Limpopo province, South Africa

South Africa is known for having the highest number of sexual violence cases in the world. In response to these reports, the government has declared rape as a priority crime, and various measures have been put in place to address this scourge. Despite these measures, rape statistics have continued to escalate. It is against this background that this study sought to explore accounts of sexual offences, particularly reports of rape, from a sample of sex offenders. Data were drawn from five Correctional Centres in the Limpopo province. Nineteen sex offenders were selected through a purposive sampling approach and interviewed face-to-face. Discourse analysis was used to identify and analyse the patterns of talk that sex offenders drew upon to account for their sex offences. Findings revealed that ‘blame’ was the most dominant discourse cited. The ‘rhetoric of blame’ revolved around uncontained sexual desires, sexual entitlement, absent mothers, provocative dress code by women, and unfair laws that discriminated men when they asserted their sexual power in relationships with women. Multi-sectoral intervention strategies are recommended for deconstructing blame discourses that perpetuate rape offences in South Africa.

The Link Between Parental Absence and Poor Reading Comprehension: Evidence From the Left-Behind Children in Rural China

Family environment affects children’s reading ability. In poverty-stricken parts of rural China, some parents have been migrant workers for many years. It is common for left-behind children to have one or both parents permanently missing. This study explores the impact of parental absence on children’s reading comprehension. We measured the reading comprehension of 903 children (467 left-behind and 436 parented), using the Chinese Primary School Students’ Reading Comprehension Ability Scale. After controlling for the parents’ levels of education, reading input, and interest variables, we found that children with absent parents had significantly lower reading comprehension scores than parented children; they struggled to understand chapter layout, the author’s intentions, writing technique, evaluation, and appreciation. While children with absent fathers received the same scores as parented children, those with absent mothers received significantly lower scores. Clearly, absent mothers have a greater impact on children’s reading comprehension than absent fathers.

Blood and Soul (1923) and the Cultural Politics of Japanese Film Reform

Research Article| August 01 2018 Blood and Soul (1923) and the Cultural Politics of Japanese Film Reform Diane Wei Lewis Diane Wei Lewis Diane Wei Lewis is an assistant professor in the Program in Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is finishing a book manuscript on cinema, identification, and emotion in interwar Japan. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2018) 26 (3): 450–482. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-6868239 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Diane Wei Lewis; Blood and Soul (1923) and the Cultural Politics of Japanese Film Reform. positions 1 August 2018; 26 (3): 450–482. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-6868239 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll Journalspositions Search Advanced Search In the early 1920s, Japanese filmmakers increasingly adopted American-style production practices and strategies of representation. Resisting this trend, the Nikkatsu film company’s Mukōjima studio advocated multiple approaches to filmmaking, challenging the rhetoric of “purity” that was used by both cultural conservatives as well as the pure film movement, which pushed for Hollywood-style reforms. Mukōjima defended heterogeneity as inevitable, given the ongoing process of modernization, and the forms of cultural mixture, conflict, and contradiction it produced. Its kakushin (reform)-era policies made it possible for young Mizoguchi Kenji to make Japan’s first expressionist film, Blood and Soul (Chi to rei, 1923). Blood and Soul is based on a novella by the half-Russian, half-Japanese writer Ōizumi Kokuseki. It tells the story of a Chinese jeweler in Nagasaki who inherits murderous impulses from his mother and kills to reclaim the jewels he makes. The jeweler forbids his Japanese apprentice from marrying his daughter, fearing her blood is contaminated as well. After the apprentice takes the blame for his master’s crimes, a painter attempts to understand his motivations and listens to his confession, in which taboo desires and absent mothers provide the key to the story’s interlocking narrative strands. Blood and Soul is critical of reform-era discourses on cultural authenticity. Its complex exploration of fractured identity and intersubjectivity dramatizes irrational fears about cultural mixture and miscegenation. The impure body is depicted as a virulent aesthetic force that generates the dense intertextuality of the novella and the hallucinogenic mise-en-scène of the film. Interrogating the very concepts of identity and mastery of the self, Blood and Soul is an example of an experimental production that rejected the rhetoric of “purity” in a time of film reform, affirming cultural hybridity in the face of pure film demands. Japanese cinema, race, pure film movement, Ōizumi Kokuseki (1894–1957), Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956), Nikkatsu Mukōjima studio, expressionism The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 Duke University Press2018 You do not currently have access to this content.

When Is Neglect, Neglect?: It Depends on Who You Ask.

In order to identify victims of child neglect, social service workers rely heavily on referrals from concerned friends, neighbors, and others in the community. Little is known, however, about how lay individuals perceive child neglect and what factors influence their decision to make a referral. This study explored the effects of child, parent, and participant gender on laypersons' evaluations of child neglect. Participants read a case of neglect of a child by a custodial and absent parent and then rated the parents' culpability and intentionality and decided whether the parents' behavior met the legal definition of neglect. When evaluating the custodial parent, men but not women viewed fathers as more culpable than mothers for the neglect of their son and viewed mothers as somewhat more culpable for the neglect of their daughter. Men also perceived absent mothers as more intentionally harmful than absent fathers. Finally, both men and women were more likely to qualify parental behavior as legally neglectful when the genders of the custodial parent and child matched. Results, which suggest that gender bias may exist in laypersons' perceptions of child neglect and may influence their decisions to report, have implications for identification of and intervention for vulnerable children and families.

Sojourning Scots and the Portrait Miniature in Colonial India, 1770s‐1780s

AbstractThis article seeks to extend the prevailing art histories of later eighteenth‐century portrait miniatures beyond the dominant narratives of authorship and affect. It does so by considering the social role of these diminutive objects in affirming life and liveliness by mapping consanguineal relations between sojourning Scots in colonial India and their absent mothers and sisters back home in Scotland. This gendered axis – in which the portraits are commissioned by young, unmarried men for the possession and display on the bodies of their dislocated female family members – is complemented by equivalent geographical and temporal axes.

Growth and development profile of children at two day care centers in Jakarta

Background Working mothers with toddlers are often confusedwith the difficulties of caregiver substitutes. This leads to the con-cern about neglecting their toddlers. Day care centers are expectedto respond by substituting the absent mothers, in order for thechildren’s needs of growth and development to become optimal.Objective To examine the profile of day care centers in correla-tion with growth and development of toddlers, and to understandthe characteristics of facilities for growth and development in tod-dlers at day care centers.Method This cross-sectional study was conducted at the day carecenters (DCC) of the Department of Social Affairs of the Republicof Indonesia Harapan Ibu (HI) in Salemba, Central Jakarta andTeratai in Bekasi from February 1-August 1, 2004.Results There were 106 children enrolled in this study; 47 chil-dren in DCC HI and 59 in DCC Teratai, male:female ratio was 1:1,mostly at age 3.1-5 years. Growth status was measured accord-ing to body weight/age, body height/age, height circumference/age and found good, normal, and proper growth status in 85 chil-dren (80.2%), 48 children (45.3%), 102 children (96.2%), respec-tively. We found good nutritional status in 44 children (41.5%) andnormal developmental status (Denver II) in 81 children (76.4%).Ratio of caregivers to child was 1:10. All children had completeimmunization. No trauma or upper respiratory tract infection wasrecorded as frequent morbidity. Parents’ reasons for relying theirchildren in DCCs were to enable their children to socialize (50children/47.2%), and to allow them to become independent (49children/46.2%).Conclusion DCCs can serve as a safe alternative caregiving sub-stitute based on good growth and development, good nutritionalstatus, also good characteristics facilities

Redeeming Lost Mothers: Adolescent Antiretroviral Treatment and the Making of Home in South Africa

ABSTRACTIn this article, we explore how adolescent antiretroviral treatment (ART) might be signified to repair sociality in Eastern Cape homes that have been ruptured by HIV/AIDS and maternal loss. The post-apartheid period has exposed these families to new forms of social fragmentation, propelled by the disintegration of wage labor, declining marriage rates, and a rampant HIV/AIDS epidemic. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork (August 2013–April 2014), we show that in the homes of some adolescents born with HIV, these present-day domestic ruptures were discursively connected to the past shortcomings of their dead and absent mothers. In some familial narratives lost mothers were accused of disobeying their elders, neglecting their children, and flouting custom; their social transgressions were made manifest in their child’s inherited HIV. By signifying adolescent ART-taking as an enactment of the discipline and care purportedly absent in their mothers, these families might also attempt to imbue ART, beyond its biomedical function, as a means of social repair.

The Submerged Plot and the Mother’s Pleasure: from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy by Kelly A. Marsh

MARSH, KELLY A. The Submerged Plot and the Mother's Pleasure: from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2016. 296 pp. $84.95 cloth, $19.95 e-book. Kelly Marsh's compelling book provides fresh insight into well-known novels by attending to what she terms the 'submerged in which the daughter must seek the unnarratable story of her sexual pleasure. As Marsh explains: finding the unnarratable story of the pleasure is crucial to a daughter's search for her own pleasure, and not finding the story can be debilitating in this regard....the submerged plot is threatened by the same forces render the pleasure unnarratable, primarily the preservation of lines of inheritance, to which a pleasure is, at best, extraneous. (153) While Marsh is not the first to examine the significance of absent mothers in the novels she discusses, her attention to the experience of sexual pleasure complicates earlier psychoanalytic and feminist readings of female characters and contributes to the study of feminist narratology, building on the work of Robyn Warhol and Susan Stanford Friedman. Marsh's readings of each novel are prefaced by a quotation describes the mother and her name, highlighting the limited information readers are given about the mother. She opens her discussion of each text with a provocative series of questions or narrative puzzles can be answered by closely reading the glimmers...that are just detectable of the story (4). The first two chapters focus on nineteenth-century novels: Jane Austen's Persuasion. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. Marsh asks readers to understand the protagonist daughter's actions in light of her mostly unnarrated story: in Austen and Bronte, the submerged and surface plot work in tandem to bring about a satisfying resolution: in Dickens and Collins, the story of the transgression is investigated in the surface mystery plot at the expense of the submerged plot of the pleasure. Marsh suggests the heroine's seeming passivity in the surface mystery plot of these novels can be explained by her agency in the submerged plot. In both chapters, Marsh provides a new perspective not just on the absent mother or the protagonist daughter, but also on a host of minor characters--for example, her persuasive claim Mary Elliot Musgrove's whining indicates her anxiety that others will respond to her illness and death as her father responded to her mother's (36), or her careful teasing out of the complex family relationships in Collins's The Woman in White. Indeed, more extended readings of these minor characters would be welcome: given Marian Halcombe's importance in Collins's novel, the discussion of her in this chapter seems unusually tentative and brief. …

The Mother, Who Is Not One: Reflections Of Motherhood In Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet, The Tempest, And The Taming Of The Shrew

Abstract The lack of proper motherhood in Shakespeare's plays has been a point of attraction for many feminist critics actively engaged in emphasizing the patriarchal aspect of Shakespeare's plays. This paper aims to analyze motherhood and the lack of mother/mother-figure in The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew through Luce Irigaray's theory of gender and the work of other feminist critics. The issues of gender, father-daughter relations and the reflections of the absent mothers will be discussed. Male/Female Subjectivity will also be questioned, in view of Irigaray's conceptualization of gender by relating it to Subject.

Barriers and facilitators to paediatric adherence to antiretroviral therapy in rural South Africa: a multi-stakeholder perspective

Poor adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) contributes to the development of drug resistance. HIV-infected children, especially those 5 years and under, are dependent on a caregiver to adhere to ART. However, characteristics of the caregiver, child, regimen, clinic and social context affect clinic attendance and medication-taking, both of which constitute adherent behaviour. We conducted nine interviews and three focus groups to determine how doctors, nurses, counsellors, traditional healers and caregivers understood the barriers and facilitators to ART adherence among children residing in rural South Africa. The data were transcribed, translated into English from isiZulu where necessary, and coded using Atlas.ti version 7. Results were interpreted through the lens of Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory. We found that at the micro-level, palatability of medication and large volumes of medication were problematic for young children. Characteristics of the caregiver including absent mothers, grandmothers as caregivers and denial of HIV amongst fathers were themes related to the micro-system. Language barriers and inconsistent attendance of caregivers to monthly clinic visits were factors affecting adherence in the meso-system. Adherence counselling and training were the most problematic features in the exo-system. In the macro-system, the effects of food insecurity and the controversy surrounding the use of traditional medicines were most salient. Increased supervision and regular training amongst lay adherence counsellors are needed, as well as regular monitoring of the persons attending the clinic on the child's behalf.

Absent or Ambivalent Mothers and Avoidant Children – An Evolutionary Reading of Zhang Kangkang’s Motherhood Stories

This evolutionary reading of the Chinese writer Zhang Kangkang’s maternal stories explores the specificities and agency of mothers and of children. The dilemma confronted by physically absent and/or emotionally detached mothers, depicted in Zhang’s stories, entails women’s strategic intelligence to make tradeoffs between their reproductive efforts and their life stage and conditions. It sheds light on conditional maternal commitment, the necessity and feasibility of cooperative childrearing, and various mother–child conflicts.Zhang’s texts also describe insecurely attached infants and children who sink into a nonchalant and avoidant state after experiencing distress, terror, or resentment due to insensitive and unpredictable mothering. Absent and ambivalent mothers are generally harassed by the feeling of guilt, resulting from conditional maternal commitment, mother-child conflicts, and the high expectations of the motherhood myth. Children’s counterstrategies also regulate and enhance maternal or alloparental care.

Geographical distance between children and absent parents in separated families

.In recent decades, the share of traditional nuclear‐family households has decreased in most Western countries, resulting in an increase in the proportion of children living in other forms of household constellations. How children with an absent parent or vice versa arrange their life and relations is partly a matter of physical distance between them. The aim of the study is to analyse the geographical distance between children and absent parents, that is, parents living in another household. The study is a cross‐sectional study based on register data comprising all children in Sweden in 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005. Using descriptive statistics and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis, we examine the development and determinants of the distance between children and absent parents. OLS regression is employed in order to clarify how the distance relates to the age of the child, as well as demographic and socio‐economic characteristics of the present and absent parents. The results show that while the share of children living with only one parent has increased over time, the average distance between children and absent parents has decreased. The distance between children and absent parents is strongly related to the sex of the absent parent and the age of the child. Absent mothers tend to live closer to their children compared with absent fathers, and the younger the children are, the shorter the distance to the absent parents. Among other factors that influence the distance are remarriage and having a child with another parent, both of which contribute to increasing distances between children and absent parents.

“Mother, Where Art Thou?” Absence and Motherhood in Tim Winton’s Fiction

Absent mothers are striking features in Tim Winton’s novels, whether induced by death, circumstance or their own will. Motherhood is inextricably linked with trauma and suffering, either on the side of the mothers themselves, their husbands or their children. In this paper I will explain how absence and motherhood together function as metaphors for traumatic displacement and contribute to a redefinition of cultural, national and individual boundaries, while also illuminating problematic gender relations in Australia and their cultural representations. The focus is on a close-text analysis of The Riders (1994) while Winton’s other novels will be used to contextualise and strengthen the points made in this paper.

Can attribution of a neutral emotional state in child discipline play an adaptive role in child internalising behaviour?

Maternal rates of child internalising behaviour were compared across children's emotion attributions (neutral, fear, anger, sadness and happiness) to others in a discipline situation, after controlling for socio-demographic covariates. Sixty-five Brazilian mothers provided socio-demographic information and rated their preschool children's internalising behaviour. Children attributed emotions to a protagonist in a story facing maternal discipline. Analysis of covariance showed that children from homes with absent fathers, low-income or less-educated mothers received significantly higher internalising rates. Attribution of a neutral emotional state was linked to significantly lower child internalising behaviour, relative to attributions of anger, sadness or fear, independently from disciplinary tactics. Paternal absence was related to maternal rates of child internalising behaviour independently from diminished income, against a stereotype of Latino fathers as ‘uninvolved’. Children's attribution of a neutral emotional state to others facing maternal discipline may be rare but seems to play an adaptive role in internalising behaviour.

Introduction: Women, Mobilities, Immobilities and Empowerment

The articles in this volume are collated from field studies in East and Southeast Asia on several key aspects of women's experiences related to work and mobility. They highlight a range of issues based on women's labor as migrants, whose social or biological, paid or unpaid labor, are structural continuities that characterize the nature of women's role and status within households and families across cultural systems in East and Southeast Asia. The articles in this volume demonstrate how contemporary developments in work and mobility affect women migrants from developing countries. The 21st century has been said to be one that will see the rise and dominance of Asia. To fuel this systemic economic takeoff implies an increase in human flows within and to this region to respond to demographic and economic differentials across the region. Against this backdrop, this volume discusses the role that women in migration play as foreign wives, domestic workers and seasonal rural to urban migrants. It maps some of the issues that they confront in destination countries, as well as in their own homes as absent wives, mothers and daughters in expanded networks of global householding. On another level, this volume frames the overseas employment and settlement of women migrants in destination countries, in the contexts of contestations between States, organized labor exporters and emergent migrant women's movements, which for migrant women represent their individual and collective strategies for making a ‘bare life’1 (Agamben, 1998:177, 180) liveable. The studies here underscore the potential that migration offers to women in this region, while highlighting the complexities and contradictions in labor supply and its relationship to politics, culture and capital.

Molière and Modernity: Absent Mothers and Masculine Births

Molière and Modernity: Absent Mothers and Masculine Births

Redefining the Modern: Essays on Literature and Society in Honor of Joseph Wiesenfarth (review)

Reviewed by: Redefining the Modern: Essays on Literature and Society in Honor of Joseph Wiesenfarth Allan Hepburn (bio) William Baker and Ira B. Nadel , editors. Redefining the Modern: Essays on Literature and Society in Honor of Joseph WiesenfarthFairleigh Dickinson University Press. 222. US $47.50 Redefining the Modern is a miscellany. It includes eight scholarly essays, an interview with Margaret Drabble, twenty-eight letters written by George Eliot and George H. Lewes, a flippant essay on God and comedy, and information about Joseph Wiesenfarth, to whom this collection is dedicated. The introduction claims that modernists perpetrate 'redefinitions and realignments' of culture in response to Victorian predecessors. These essays do not demonstrate such redefinitions or realignments, except by happenstance. Most scholars writing in this volume simply take on an interpretive problem without any redefinition of 'the modern' per se. The quality of the essays is uneven - an inherent problem in an edited collection but not a fatal one. James R. Kincaid's contribution, 'God's Disappeared,' slides into irrelevance, unscholarliness, and silliness. Like a self-important undergraduate, Kincaid writes, 'It is important first to secure a correct understanding (my understanding) of comedy.' Ironic grandiosity does not help this essay: 'Comedy doesn't live free or die; it lives free and lives.' Superb essays by Joseph A. Kestner, Thomas Schaub, and Ira Nadel compensate for Kincaid's. Kestner supplements scholarship on New Women with a detailed analysis of Grant Allen's Miss Cayley's Adventures and 1890s magazine debates about women's adventures and women as adventuresses. Schaub's essay on Richard Wright's Native Son contrasts Bigger Thomas's private world of feeling with the public world of action, racism, and justice. By focusing on household space, Schaub demonstrates that race inflects domestic relations: African Americans sleep in the basement by the furnace; white folks bunk on the second floor. Ira Nadel expertly untangles intertextual connections between Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Garbage heaps generate literature, as both Dickens's and Joyce's representations of refuse, bits of paper, and acronyms suggest. 'From the litter comes the letter as from the dump,' Joyce writes. Coincidentally, Nadel refers to texts as riddles, a notion that Schaub pursues in Native Son. This connection is probably accidental, but it confers some unity on a volume of otherwise disparate essays. Affording another kind of unity, Jane Austen frames this volume. In his essay on comedy, Paul Goetsch manoeuvres through instances of satirical and corrective laughter in Pride and Prejudice. When Lydia elopes with Wickham, she claims that she can hardly write because she is laughing so hard. Laughter for Lydia brings no improvement; she remains committed to fun even when her marriage isolates and financially distresses her. [End Page 352] Goetsch cites conduct books that instruct women not to laugh aloud for fear of risking vulgarity. Writing about Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjori-banks as a parody of George Eliot's Romola, Elizabeth Winston invokes Austen's Emma as a plot about absent mothers and mentors. An illuminating interview with Margaret Drabble about Jane Austen concludes this volume. Originally broadcast on radio in 1998, this exchange between Drabble and Emily Auerbach is filled with insights about gender and influence. As the general editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Drabble is ideally placed to comment on Austen's abiding impact on writers over the last two centuries. Drabble expresses anxiety about imitating Austen's marriage plots in her own narratives. She extols Austen's comedy: 'I think she's one of the funniest writers who ever wrote. I think there are sublime moments of comedy - some of them satiric comedy, some of them pure fun; moments of repartee, moments of comeback.' Drabble comments adroitly on the differences between men and women in their appreciation, or dismissal, of Austen. Charlotte Brontë and Mark Twain disliked Austen, yet Drabble herself has absorbed Austen's comic vision and technique into her world view. Errors of syntax, spelling, and punctuation throughout Redefining the Modern escaped the editors' notice. 'Christabel LaMotte' in Possession is misspelled as 'Christable.' 'Homogenous' is used when 'homogeneous' is meant. 'Information concerning postmarks and watermarks have [sic...