Paternity and Fatherhood Myths and Realities

What kind of connotation does the word 'father' have in everyday language? How have states and governments defined and manipulated the paternal role? What is a 'father-figure'? What can literature tell us about absent or overbearing fathers? How far is the cultural construct of fatherhood linked to biological paternity, and what is biological paternity? These are some of the questions explored through the chapters in this book, which together offer a fascinatingly complex view of fatherhood across the centuries.

Preface Notes on the Contributors Introduction: Mythical Constructs and Social Realities; L.Spaas PART ONE: BIOLOGICAL PATERNITY IN LAW AND LANGUAGE Heredity and Paternity; M.Andreoli The Paternal Role and the Napoleonic Code; X.Martin DNA and the Stakes in Embodying Paternity; C.Mossman Factoring the Father; C.McDonald Heredity of Power and Paternity of the Text in some Medieval Works; Y.de Pontfarcy Pére and Mére: Unequals in Language; P.Bolusset PART TWO: ABSENT FATHERS Life without Father: Revisions of Paternity in Women's Writing in France; J.Birkett Absent Fathers across the Spectrum of Local Colour in the Short Stories of Kate Chopin; J.B.Goodwyn Death of the Father and Birth of Idolatry: from Mme de Sevigne to her Daughter ; A.Cozea The Father-Effect: Rimbaud, Pessoa; J-J.Hamm PART THREE: REINVENTING FATHER Fatherhood in the Works of George Sand; A.Szabo Politics and Fatherhood in the African Novel: Le Chercheur D'Afriques by Henri Lopes ; P.Corcoran Loys Masson: Writing the Father; M.Mongelard Il Papa, Sade's Pater Beyond Compare; B.Fink Kafka's Papa; S.L.Gilman Death with Father in David Copperfield ; J.Nunokawa PART FOUR: PATERNITY, SEX, GENDER AND SUCCESSION Why do Ogres Eat Babies? Monstrous Paternity in Myth and Fairytales; M.Warner Fathers as Mothers: the Myth of Male Parthenogenesis; L.Thomas Dispossessing the Father in the Fiction of Michel Tournier; M.Ferrigan Molière's Disturbing Fathers; T.Gorilovics Shakespeare and the Misrecognition of Fathers and Sons; L.Danson 'Father and Mother is One Flesh': Hamlet and the Problems of Paternity; A.Thompson & N.Taylor Mystical Estates and Legal Fictions: Modernism's Apostolic Successions; S.Smith Epilogue Index

LIEVE SPAAS is Professor of French Cultural Studies at Kingston University. She has published on Rousseau and the eighteenth-century novel and is part of the CNRS Rousseau research team in Paris. Her socio-historical analysis of the correspondence of Catherine de Saint-Pierre to her brother Bernardin appeared in 1996, Lettres de Catherine de Saint-Pierre a son frère Bernardin. She is co-editor with Brian Stimpson of Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, and is general editor of the `Cultural Studies Monographs' series with Berghahn Books.