9780708325896
Distributed for University of Wales Press
Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France
Life As Literature
Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France is a collection of critical essays on recent literature written by women in France. It takes stock of the themes, issues, and trends in women’s writing of the first decade of the twenty-first century and engages critically with the work of individual authors through close readings. Authors covered include major prizewinners, best-selling authors, and established and new writers whose work has attracted scholarly attention. Topics covered in the essays include translation, popular fiction, society, history, war, family relations, violence, trauma, the body, racial identity, sexual identity, feminism, life-writing, and textual/aesthetic experiments.
320 pages | 6 halftones | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2013
French and Francophone Studies
Literature and Literary Criticism: Romance Languages
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgement
List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
Part One: Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Trends and Issues
1. Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Introduction
Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye
2. What ‘Passes’?: French Women Writers and Translation into English
Lynn Penrod
3. What Women Read: Contemporary Women’s Writing and the Best-seller
Diana Holmes
Part Two: Society, Culture, Family
4. Vichy, Jews, Enfants Cachés: French Women Writers Look Back
Lucille Cairns
5. Wives and Daughters in Literary Works Representing the Harkis
Susan Ireland
6. (Not) Seeing Things: Marie NDiaye, (Negative) Hallucination and ‘Blank’ Métissage
Andrew Asibong
7. Rediscovering the Absent Father, a Question of Recognition: Despentes, Tardieu
Lori Saint-Martin
8. Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on Motherhood
Natalie Edwards
Part Three: Body, Life, Text
9. The Becoming of Anorexia and Text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jours sans faim
Amaleena Damlé
10. The Human-Animal in Ananda Devi’s Texts: Towards an Ethics of Hybridity?
Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy
11. Embodiment, Environment and the Reinvention of Self in Nina Bouraoui’s Life-Writing
Helen Vassallo
12. Irreverent Revelations: Women’s Confessional Practices of the Extreme Contemporary
Barbara Havercroft
13. Contamination Anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s Twenty-First-Century Texts
Simon Kemp
Part Four: Experiments, Interfaces, Aesthetics
14. Experience and Experiment in the Work of Marie Darrieussecq
Helena Chadderton
15. Interfaces: Verbal/Visual Experiment in New Women’s Writing in French
Shirley Jordan
16. ‘Autofiction + x = ?’: Chloe Delaume’s Experimental Self-Representations
Deborah B. Gaensbauer
17. Beyond Antoinette Fouque (Il y a deux sexes) and Beyond Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)? Anne Garréta’s Sphinxes
Owen Heathcote
18. Amélie the Aesthete: Art and Politics in the World of Amélie Nothomb
Anna Kemp
Conclusion
Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye
Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye
Works Cited
Index