This book offers a major synthesis of an important subject—representations of motherhood from the Industrial Revolution to the present, along with anticipations of the future. In it E. Ann Kaplan, a specialist in film and feminist psychoanalytic theory, attempts to link maternal representations from several domains—the psychoanalytic, the historical from 1930 to the postmodernist present, and popular culture, including fiction, film, and other media.

Motherhood and Representation opens with lucid summaries of the historical and psychoanalytic spheres pertinent to her more expansive chapters on mother-representations in popular culture. The book aims to demonstrate “how fictional mother-representations are produced through the tensions between the historical and