Silences, Stories, Scripts: Transcultural Perspectives on Mothers and Daughters

We reflect on mother-daughter relationships across literary history, with particular attention to transcultural, comparative, and cross-period perspectives.

Spanning the medieval to the contemporary, this 2-day conference asks how maternal and filial female bonds are imagined as forms of kinship, authority, and belonging, and how those bonds register in generic and aesthetic terms.

Adrienne Rich described ‘the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter’ as ‘the essential female tragedy.’ Rather than treating this loss as timeless, the conference approaches it as historically and culturally situated. Medieval and early modern texts often render maternal figures marginal, symbolic, or silent; modern and contemporary writing, particularly in immigrant and diasporic contexts, often stages the mother-daughter bond as a pressured relation, marked by conflicting expectations and uneven forms of inheritance. A comparative frame makes it possible to trace the evolution of daughterhood, maternal authority, and intergenerational attachment through shifting regimes of gender, labour, lineage, and social legitimacy.

The conference is especially interested in the conceptual triad named in its title – silence, story, script – as a way of reading mother-daughter relations.

Keynote lectures will be given by Kirsty Bolton (University of Oxford) and Eglė Kačkutė (Vilnius University, Lithuania).

The conference is organised by Stephanie Ng (Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, Institute of Languages Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London), Isabella Clarke (University of Oxford) and Lucia Boldrini (CCL).

The conference is free to attend.

Video recordings of the papers will be available after the conference only to registered participants.

Conference webpage

Dates & times

Accessibility

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