HéLèNe Cixous

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex

'Royle considers Cixous’s work in relation to that of authors that she has herself read and analyzed, in particular Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida. The author states that his study is intended to be accessible for readers with little background in feminist literary theory, deconstruction, or psychoanalysis, and he delivers on that promise. This study is an exercise in creative reading, an approach Royle defines in the introduction for those unfamiliar with it… The book is compelling and will interest readers of Cixous in any language.'Reprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association.'This book offers a source of delectation and insight to readers of Hélène Cixous’s writing. It is delightful in numerous respects. Charmingly ludic, it veers playfully — in a manner theorized by its author a decade earlier as characteristic of literature itself — not only between Cixous’s texts and between her texts and those of a host of other writers as disparate as Shakespeare, Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, and Agatha Christie, but, in addition, between the four words of the subtitle: dreamer, realist, analyst, writing.'French Studies

• Foreword: Forewarnings by Eric Prenowitz 1 Introduction: dreamer, realist, analyst, writing 2 Cixous cuts: through everything 3 Advertisement: the joys of literature and the return of the dead 4 Cixous cuts: take time 5 Dream in literature 6 Cixous cuts: from the axe to giving birth 7 Away 8 Cixous cuts: the veil in me 9 Portmanteau 10 Cixous cuts: Lewis Carroll 11 To awake, Shakespeare of the Night 12 Dream treatment: on sitting down to read a letter from Freud 13 Side thinking 14 All wards 15 Four words for Cixous 16 The one time Hélène Cixous entered my gardenLettre à Nick – Héléne CixousLetter to Nick – Héléne Cixous (translated by Eric Prenowitz)Index of works by Cixous General index