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Much has been written on Simone de Beauvoir, one of France’s leading intellectual figures of the 20th century. The sheer volume of her autobiographical writings testifies to her indefatigable questioning of the nature of existence and her personal and public engagement in the world over the best part of a century. This study aims to re-evaluate her extensive autobiographical œuvre, exploring its place in relation to the French autobiographical canon, and in the light of recent theorisations of autobiography. It presents readings which engage critically with existentialism, feminist theory, and autobiography studies generally, in particular focusing on the question of ‘autothanatography...
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 the 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. Authors covered include major prizewinners, best-selling authors, established and new writers whose work attracts scholarly attention, including those whose texts have been translated into English such as Christine Angot, Nina Bouraoui, Marie Darrieussecq as Chloé Delaume, Claudie Gallay and Anna Gavalda. Themes include translation, popular fiction, society, history, war, family relations, violence, trauma, the body, racial identity, sexual identity, feminism, life-writing and textual/aesthetic experiments.
This book investigates a new form of fiction that is currently emerging in contemporary literature across the globe. 'Novels of the contemporary extreme' - from North and South America, from Europe, and the Middle East - are set in a world both similar to and different from our own: a hyper real, often apocalyptic world progressively invaded by popular culture, permeated with technology and dominated by destruction. While their writing is commonly classified as 'hip' or 'underground' literature, authors of contemporary extreme novels have often been the center of public controversy and scandal; they, and their work, become international bestsellers. This collection of essays identifies and describes this international phenomenon, investigating the appeal of these novels' styles and themes, the reasons behind their success, and the fierce debates they provoked.
This collection of essays brings an approach to Beauvoir studies and makes an important contribution to Beauvoir's writing practice in her novels and short stories, and analysis the extent to which the meaning of her texts cannot be separated from the way they are written.
The “Self” Which is Not One: Women’s Life-Writing in French, assembles articles on women’s life-writing from diverse areas of the Francophone world. It is comprised of nine chapters that discuss female writers from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, in addition to French writers. The idea of the self is currently attracting widespread interest in academia, most notably in the arts and humanities. The development of postmodernism supposes a fragmented “subject” formed from the network of available discourses, rather than a stable and coherent self. Jacques Derrida, for example, wrote that there is no longer any such things as a “full subject,” and Juli...
What is 'the literary fantastic' and how does it manifest itself in the texts of French and francophone women writers publishing at the close of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first century? What do we mean today when we talk of 'the real' and 'realism'? These are just some of the questions addressed by the papers in this volume which derive from a conference entitled 'The Fantastic in Contemporary Women's Writing in French' held in London in September 2007. This book sets out to refocus through a non-realist lens on the works of high-profile authors (Darrieussecq, Nothomb, Germain, Cixous and NDiaye) and some of their less highly publicised contemporaries. It analyses and mobilises a wide range of both gendered and non-gendered practices and theories of 'the contemporary fantastic' whilst critically interrogating both of the latter terms and their inter-relation.
This book is a multi-disciplinary anthology about the role of female figures in dystopian narratives. Such female figures, from all stages of life, are often critical to these narratives, positing females as particularly powerful heroines or catalysts to action, especially in young adult manifestations, such as The Hunger Games and Divergent trilogies, among others. This book explores the totality of these rich and varied roles, from fiction to television to film. This collection will capture the interest of scholars and students in popular culture, literature, gender studies, and media, as well as fan readers and followers of genre fiction, television, and film.
The impetus behind this collection of essays was a curiosity shared by the editors concerning the relation between the flesh and the text in French and francophone literature. This subject is explored here in readings of works by, among others, Rabelais, Diderot, Sade, Proust, Beckett, Djebar, Nothomb, Delvig and Nobécourt.
In the 1990s the French literary arena was enlivened by the emergence of a new generation of women writers. This book selects six of its most distinctive voices and addresses important questions about the very new in French women's writing. What are young women choosing to write about? What do they tell us about changing perceptions of feminine identities? What does it mean to write (and to read) as women at the start of the new millennium? An introductory chapter explores key issues such as the woman writer in the public imagination and continuity and change within French women's writing since the 1970s. It also highlights thematic threads which recur across the work of the authors studied:...
In the African context, there exists the 'myth' that orality means tradition. Written and oral verbal art are often regarded as dichotomies, one excluding the other. While orature is confused with 'tradition', literature is ascribed to modernity. Furthermore, local languages are ignored and literature is equated with writing in foreign languages. The contributions in this volume take issue with such preconceptions and explore the multiple ways in which literary and oral forms interrelate and subvert each other, giving birth to new forms of artistic expression. They emphasize the local agency of the African poet and writer, which resists the global commodification of literature through the in...