Mothers and Sons in Contemporary Literature: Voices, Bodies, and Time

This study explores representations of mother-son relations in Swedish twenty-first century life writing by men about their mothers’ lives. It argues that these filial auto/biographies allow for representations of sonhood and motherhood as embodied relations-in-progress over the life course, and offer routes to understanding masculinities as connected, emotionally complex, processual, and relationally constructed with mothers and motherhood. The unique perspective of the study contributes to masculinity studies and motherhood studies as well as (feminist) literary studies, and also counters the pervasive privileging of homosocial masculinities. Filial auto/biographies have some features in common, and the study addresses three central dimensions: giving voice to the mother, representing the maternal body, and narrating (life)time. Each of these raise questions about age, generation, gender, and class; about memory; representation and power; and about the ethics of using family relations as literary “material.” However, they also vary; differences in narrative structure, style, tone, emphases, and emotional charge contribute to creating a multitude of stories about the mother-son relation, and while predominantly focusing on the mother’s life, some offer a parallel story about the son’s own development. The chapters offer literary analyses of a selection of books, while also contextualizing these in terms of tendencies in international filial life writing.