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“Scared, disgusted, overcome with love”: Anthropocene Mothering in Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness.

Grzybowska, Wiktoria LU (2025) LIVR07 20251
Master's Programme: Literature - Culture - Media
Abstract
By inspecting Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, this thesis positions the practice of mothering within the larger Anthropocene humanities scholarship. While the Earth has often been mythologized as maternal, there has been a distinct lack of close attention paid to the cultural representations of lived experiences of mothers in the Anthropocene. Hence, this thesis begins by conducting a matricentric Anthropocene analysis, supported with new materialist scholarship, and observes how the unraveling of meaningful locations – urban, wild, and domestic spaces – affects motherwork. I then move on to the analysis of the novel’s political reality and, by utilizing Ulrich Beck’s concept of risk society, explore the consequences mothers bear of... (More)
By inspecting Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, this thesis positions the practice of mothering within the larger Anthropocene humanities scholarship. While the Earth has often been mythologized as maternal, there has been a distinct lack of close attention paid to the cultural representations of lived experiences of mothers in the Anthropocene. Hence, this thesis begins by conducting a matricentric Anthropocene analysis, supported with new materialist scholarship, and observes how the unraveling of meaningful locations – urban, wild, and domestic spaces – affects motherwork. I then move on to the analysis of the novel’s political reality and, by utilizing Ulrich Beck’s concept of risk society, explore the consequences mothers bear of failed Anthropocene politics; this chapter also discusses the potential emergence of a trans-corporeal subject. Finally, the last chapter is chiefly concerned with conducting a matricentric feminist analysis of the novel’s central mother-daughter relationship; the chapter gestures towards the potentiality of establishing an empowered mode of Anthropocene mothering. Ultimately, this thesis documents the unraveling of institutional motherhood under the Anthropocene, results in a better understanding of cultural representations of mothering, and suggests that an interdependent mode of subjectivity may consolidate mothering as a site of power in the Anthropocene. (Less)
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author
Grzybowska, Wiktoria LU
supervisor
organization
course
LIVR07 20251
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
keywords
mothering, motherhood, anthropocene, climate fiction
language
English
id
9210465
date added to LUP
2026-05-19 09:38:00
date last changed
2026-05-19 09:38:00
@misc{9210465,
  abstract     = {{By inspecting Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, this thesis positions the practice of mothering within the larger Anthropocene humanities scholarship. While the Earth has often been mythologized as maternal, there has been a distinct lack of close attention paid to the cultural representations of lived experiences of mothers in the Anthropocene. Hence, this thesis begins by conducting a matricentric Anthropocene analysis, supported with new materialist scholarship, and observes how the unraveling of meaningful locations – urban, wild, and domestic spaces – affects motherwork. I then move on to the analysis of the novel’s political reality and, by utilizing Ulrich Beck’s concept of risk society, explore the consequences mothers bear of failed Anthropocene politics; this chapter also discusses the potential emergence of a trans-corporeal subject. Finally, the last chapter is chiefly concerned with conducting a matricentric feminist analysis of the novel’s central mother-daughter relationship; the chapter gestures towards the potentiality of establishing an empowered mode of Anthropocene mothering. Ultimately, this thesis documents the unraveling of institutional motherhood under the Anthropocene, results in a better understanding of cultural representations of mothering, and suggests that an interdependent mode of subjectivity may consolidate mothering as a site of power in the Anthropocene.}},
  author       = {{Grzybowska, Wiktoria}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{“Scared, disgusted, overcome with love”: Anthropocene Mothering in Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness.}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}