Motherhood and Representation explores the portrayal and ideological coding of motherhood in U. S. culture from 1830 to the present, examining the mother within three distinct, but ultimately related spheres: the historical, which charts the changes in the role of the socially constructed, institutional mother from Rousseau, through high-modernism, to the post-modernist present; the psychoanalytic, which focuses on various theories of the mother in the unconscious, from Freud, to Lacan and the French feminists, to more recent theoretical revisions and challenges; and, finally, the mother as she is depicted in cultural representations, particularly literary and film. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.