What compels women globally to write about their experiences of motherhood and why should we read these accounts? What can be gained from the literary encounter with the matricentric text in terms of our understanding of mothers and the institution within which they function? Why has the genre of the maternal narrative undergone a veritable explosion across several nations since the turn of the twenty-first century? More importantly perhaps, what is it that these texts so urgently want to say about the realities of mothering? Finally, how has the way motherhood is represented in male authored texts changed in the last decades? These are just a few of the questions that this Special Issue hopes to address through its collection of articles on a diverse range of maternal experiences within different social and geographical contexts. The inspiration for this volume emanated from the culminating conference of the funded EU Horizon 2020 Twinning project entitled MotherNet, comprised of a team of interdisciplinary researchers from Maynooth University (Ireland), Uppsala University (Sweden), and Vilnius University (Lithuania). Held in Vilnius between 23rd and 25th of January 2024, the remit of the conference – ‘Thinking Through Motherhood: Images, Experiences and Narratives Across Time’ – was to explore the fluctuating and pluralistic nature of mothering experiences unlike more prescriptive definitions that tend to essentialise motherhood and posit it as homogenous, static and innate. Among the various contributions to the conference exploring the topic from a wide range of angles was a notable body of work on global maternal narratives, hence the decision to compile this Special Issue which aims to showcase both the richness of matrifocal writing as well as the importance of engaging with such writing. When considered alongside one another, the articles contained within this volume demonstrate the relevance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences as well as the impact of national and cultural locations on how the maternal is negotiated and navigated.
