Abstract

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