Fatherhood in Contemporary Discourse

Book excerpt: This volume offers a variety of perspectives on contemporary fatherhood: from analyses of literature, film, drama, and popular culture, to issues tackled by psychology, gender studies, and social sciences. Arranged into thematic sections, the chapters cover a wide range of approaches to fatherhood, including studies and analyses based on fieldwork and interviews with participants. Each chapter discusses various culture-dependent models of masculinity in relation to the topic of fatherhood depicted in works of literary and film art, emphasizing the crucial factors and features which make all these models different from one another and using examples of such cultural contexts as Australia, China, Indonesia, Brazil, and Iran. With the use of methodological tools provided by literature studies, film studies, culture studies, psychology, gender and queer studies, and sociology, the book is a comprehensive insight into current research on both real-life and fictional realizations of fatherhood.