Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life As Literature (French and Francophone Studies)

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century. 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 bestseller, 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 re-invention 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 = ?’: Chloé 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 19. Conclusion, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye "Women's writing in twenty-first-century France is a collection of critical essays on recent women-authored literature in France. It takes stock of themes, issues and trends in women's writing of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and it engages critically with the work of individual authors through close textual readings. Etablished authors from the so-called 'new generation' of young French writers of the 1990's are discussed - Christine Angot, Nina Bouraoui, Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Ananda Devi, Marie NDiaye, Amélie Nothomb - alongside exciting new authors deserving of further critical attention - Chloé Delaume, Claudie Gallay, Anna Gavalda, Véronique Olmi, Laurence Tardieu. Themes covered in the essays range from poular fiction to history, from the body and identity to textual experiments and translation."--Back cover Womens 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 womens 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.