Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France

Amaleena Damlé is Research Fellow in French at Girton College, Cambridge. She is a specialist in 20th- and 21st-century French literature and thought, with a particular focus on women’s writing.Gill Rye is Professor Emerita and Associate Fellow at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, London. She has published widely in the field of contemporary women’s writing in French.

This thrilling book offers a sensitive, charged, and radically hybrid account of women's writing in France in the current century. Amaleena Damle and Gill Rye have brought together undoubtedly the finest critics in the field. Their volume will be quickly the work of reference on its topic. As such it acts as a beautiful tribute to the brilliant scholar to whose memory it is dedicated, Elizabeth Fallaize, and demonstrates how the feminist work she initiated in French Studies is far from finished. Richly defending the gender specificity of perspectives into 'women's lives, experiences and creativity' in the works discussed, the editors channel their long-held passion for and commitment to women's writing in French. The essays included bear witness to the vivid literary interest of such fictions and to the moves through which they are opening in unexpected ways to history, to anxiety, to hunger, to animality, to infancy, to metissage, to sex. Professor Emma Wilson, University of Cambridge Damle and Rye have chosen to focus the essays in this volume on the work of authors living and working in metropolitan France over the past decade. This proves to have been an inspired decision, and the range of topics covered in these essays is astonishing. The writers selected as representatives of the twenty-first century in France are very diverse and address a wide range of themes, many of which are familiar from the last three decades of the 20th century: family, relations, violence, identity and identities, the role of history, the limits and possibilities of writing, and so on. Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France should be compulsory reading for everyone interested in what is happening to creative writing today in France. Professor Michael Worton, Vice-Provost and Fielden Professor of French Language and Literature, UCL "This exciting and comprehensive study of recent women's writing offers new interpretations of well-known writers and welcome introductions to lesser-known texts. An essential point of reference to scholars of contemporary literature."--Kathryn Robson, Newcastle University

• PART ONE: Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Trends and Issues1. Women’s writing in twenty-first-century France: introductionAmaleena Damlé and Gill Rye2. What ‘passes’?: French women writers and translation into EnglishLynn Penrod3. What women read: contemporary women’s writing and the bestsellerDiana HolmesPART TWO: Society, Culture, Family4. Vichy, Jews, enfants cachés: French women writers look backLucille Cairns5. Wives and daughters in literary works representing the harkisSusan Ireland6. (Not) seeing things: Marie NDiaye, (negative) hallucination and ‘blank’ métissageAndrew Asibong7. Rediscovering the absent father, a question of recognition: Despentes, TardieuLori Saint-Martin8. Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on motherhoodNatalie EdwardsPART THREE: Body, Life, Text9. The becoming of anorexia and text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jours sans faimAmaleena Damlé10. The human-animal in Ananda Devi’s texts: towards an ethics of hybridity?Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy11. Embodiment, environment and the re-invention of self in Nina Bouraoui’s life-writingHelen Vassallo12. Irreverent revelations: women’s confessional practices of the extreme contemporaryBarbara Havercroft13. Contamination anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s twenty-first-century textsSimon KempPART FOUR: Experiments, Interfaces, Aesthetics14. Experience and experiment in the work of Marie DarrieussecqHelena Chadderton15. Interfaces: verbal/visual experiment in new women’s writing in FrenchShirley Jordan16. ‘Autofiction + x = ?’: Chloé Delaume’s experimental self-representationsDeborah B. Gaensbauer17. Beyond Antoinette Fouque (Il y a deux sexes) and beyond Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)? Anne Garréta’s sphinxesOwen Heathcote18. Amélie the aesthete: art and politics in the world of Amélie NothombAnna Kemp19. ConclusionAmaleena Damlé and Gill Rye