Silences, Stories, Scripts: Transcultural Perspectives on Mothers and Daughters in Literature (CfP deadline 15 March 2026)

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

An online conference jointly organised by the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Institute for Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

24-25 June 2026

This two-day online conference invites papers on mother-daughter relationships across literary history, with particular attention to transcultural, comparative, and cross-period perspectives. Spanning the medieval to the contemporary, the event 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. We welcome work on daughterly narration and maternal voicelessness; on forms of address, interruption, and withheld testimony; continuations and breaks in gendered expectations transmitted through maternal lineages; and on the ethical and formal tensions that arise when daughters speak near, against, or through maternal figures. The aim is not motherhood in isolation, but the relational dynamics through which mothers and daughters come into view together.

Topics may address (but are not limited to):

Concepts & Relations

• Daughterhood as a critical category across periods and genres: identification, repudiation, inheritance, authorship
• Intergenerational ambivalence – attachment, conflict, repetition, and rupture – from early literary cultures to contemporary writing
• Silence, absence, excess, and erasure in representations of mothers and daughters
• Maternal lineages and the scripting of femininity, legitimacy, and belonging across historical contexts
• Foster, surrogate, symbolic, or non-biological mother-daughter relations

Voice, Mediation & Form

• Daughters as narrators, translators, archivists, or mediators of maternal voice
• The partial visibility of mothers and daughters in pre-modern textual traditions
• Lyric, fragmentary, dialogic, and experimental forms in Victorian, modern, and contemporary writing
• Autofiction, life-writing, poetry, and hybrid genres centred on mother-daughter dynamics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature

Genre, History & Cultural Conditions

• Mother-daughter figures in romance, hagiography, drama, and devotional writing of the medieval and early modern periods
• Domesticity, inheritance, education, and gendered development in Victorian literature and culture
• Diasporic mother-daughter narratives in modern and contemporary fiction, poetry, and film, including questions of assimilation, cultural transmission, and generational conflict
• Daughterly narration under conditions of migration, trauma, postmemory, and belatedness in contemporary and late modern texts

Theoretical Approaches

• Feminist, psychoanalytic, memory-studies, postcolonial, and performance-based approaches to mother–daughter relations
• Temporalities of daughterhood – belatedness, delay, return, repetition – across literary history

The conference will comprise six themed sessions across two days, alongside two keynote lectures. Selected papers will be considered for inclusion in a proposed edited volume or special journal issue arising from the event.

Submission details:

Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words, along with a short biographical note (100 words), to [email protected] by 15 March 2026.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 31 March 2026.

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 will take place online and is free to attend.

For more information and, in due course, the programme, please visit https://sites.gold.ac.uk/comparative-literature/silences-stories-scripts/.

Contact for futher information

[email protected]