• 講　題：在明清文學中想像母親（Inventing Mothers in Late Imperial Literature）
• 主講人：趙美玲（Maria Franca Sibau）／美國埃默里大學俄語與東亞語言文化系副教授
• 主持人：衣若蘭／臺大歷史系教授
• 時　間：2024年 6 月 11 日（週二）10:00-12:00
• 地　點：臺大歷史系會議室
• 演講摘要：
  As long noted by social historians and anthropologists, in premodern Chinese society the question of who is a mother is especially complicated. The reduplication of mother figures was facilitated by ritual, social, and legal institutions and normalized by medical theories. The potential or actual multiplication of mother figures included, among others, birth mothers, legal mothers, stepmothers, wetnurses, godmothers, adoptive mothers, and of course mothers-in-law (not to mention cases in which female family members, such as big sisters, aunts, or grandmothers, served as substitute mothers). In fiction and drama, portrayals of multiple mother figures seem to favor the depiction not of a syntagmatic parade of mothers, but rather, a paradigmatic replacement of mother figures—featuring, that is, one mother at a time. Examining an array of vernacular fiction and drama from the mid-17th to the mid-18th centuries, this paper argues that the maternal multiplication intersects with, on one hand, the notion that there are “no bad parents in this world,” and, on the other, with an anxiety about the physical absence of a mother, an absence which is filled through variously creative means predicated on the fluidity of motherhood.
  

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