Gill Rye – författare

Motherhood remains a complex and contested issue in feminist research as well as public discussion. This interdisciplinary volume explores cultural representations of motherhood in various contemporary European contexts, including France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and the UK, and it considers how such representations affect the ways in which different individuals and groups negotiate motherhood as both institution and lived experience. It has a particular focus on literature, but it also includes essays that examine representations of motherhood in philosophy, art, social policy, and film. The book’s driving contention is that, through intersecting with other fields and disciplines, literature and the study of literature have an important role to play in nuancing dialogues around motherhood, by offering challenging insights and imaginative responses to complex problems and experiences. This is demonstrated throughout the volume, which covers a range of topics including: discursive and visual depictions of pregnancy and birth; the impact of new reproductive technologies on changing family configurations; the relationship between mothering and citizenship; the shaping of policy imperatives regarding mothering and disability; and the difficult realities of miscarriage, child death, violence, and infanticide. The collection expands and complicates hegemonic notions of motherhood, as the authors map and analyse shifting conceptions of maternal subjectivity and embodiment, explore some of the constraining and/or enabling contexts in which mothering takes place, and ask searching questions about what it means to be a ‘mother’ in Europe today. It will be of interest not only to those working in gender, women’s and feminist studies, but also to scholars in literary and cultural studies, and those researching in sociology, criminology, politics, psychology, medical ethics, midwifery, and related fields.

The 1990s witnessed an explosion in women’s writing in France, with a particularly exciting new generation of writer’s coming to the fore, such as Christine Angot, Marie Darrieussecq and Regine Detambel. Other authors such as Paule Constant, Sylvie Germain, Marie Redonnet and Leila Sebbar, who had begun publishing in the 1980s, claimed their mainstream status in the 1990s with new texts.The book provides an up-to-date introduction to an analysis of new women’s writing in contemporary France, including both new writers of the 1990s and their more established counter-parts. The editors’ incisive introduction situates these authors and their texts at the centre of the current trends and issues concerning French literary production today, whilst fifteen original essays focus on individual writers. The volume includes specialist bibliographies on each writer, incorporating English translations, major interviews, and key critical studies. Quotations are given in both French and English throughout.An invaluable study resource, this book is written in a clear and accessible style and will be of interest to the general reader as well as to students of all levels, to teachers of a wide range of courses on French culture, and to specialist researchers of French and Francophone literature.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

This issue of Paragraph, 'Revisiting the Scene ofWriting: New Readings of Cixous', aims both to reflect and to foster the extraordinary ongoing impact of Helene Cixous's writing across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines and literary forms

Motherhood remains a complex and contested issue in feminist research as well as public discussion. This interdisciplinary volume explores cultural representations of motherhood in various contemporary European contexts, including France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and the UK, and it considers how such representations affect the ways in which different individuals and groups negotiate motherhood as both institution and lived experience. It has a particular focus on literature, but it also includes essays that examine representations of motherhood in philosophy, art, social policy, and film. The book’s driving contention is that, through intersecting with other fields and disciplines, literature and the study of literature have an important role to play in nuancing dialogues around motherhood, by offering challenging insights and imaginative responses to complex problems and experiences. This is demonstrated throughout the volume, which covers a range of topics including: discursive and visual depictions of pregnancy and birth; the impact of new reproductive technologies on changing family configurations; the relationship between mothering and citizenship; the shaping of policy imperatives regarding mothering and disability; and the difficult realities of miscarriage, child death, violence, and infanticide. The collection expands and complicates hegemonic notions of motherhood, as the authors map and analyse shifting conceptions of maternal subjectivity and embodiment, explore some of the constraining and/or enabling contexts in which mothering takes place, and ask searching questions about what it means to be a ‘mother’ in Europe today. It will be of interest not only to those working in gender, women’s and feminist studies, but also to scholars in literary and cultural studies, and those researching in sociology, criminology, politics, psychology, medical ethics, midwifery, and related fields.

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 Issues1. Women’s writing in twenty-first-century France: introduction, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye2. What ‘passes’?: French women writers and translation into English, Lynn Penrod3. What women read: contemporary women’s writing and the bestseller, Diana HolmesPART TWO: Society, Culture, Family4. Vichy, Jews, enfants cachés: French women writers look back, Lucille Cairns5. Wives and daughters in literary works representing the harkis, Susan Ireland6. (Not) seeing things: Marie NDiaye, (negative) hallucination and ‘blank’ métissage, Andrew Asibong7. Rediscovering the absent father, a question of recognition: Despentes, Tardieu, Lori Saint-Martin8. Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on motherhood, Natalie 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 faim, Amaleena 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-writing, Helen Vassallo12. Irreverent revelations: women’s confessional practices of the extreme contemporary, Barbara Havercroft13. Contamination anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s twenty-first-century texts, Simon KempPART FOUR: Experiments, Interfaces, Aesthetics14. Experience and experiment in the work of Marie Darrieussecq, Helena Chadderton15. Interfaces: verbal/visual experiment in new women’s writing in French, Shirley Jordan16. ‘Autofiction + x = ?’: Chloé Delaume’s experimental self-representations, Deborah B. Gaensbauer17. Beyond Antoinette Fouque (Il y a deux sexes) and beyond Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)? Anne Garréta’s sphinxes, Owen Heathcote18. Amélie the aesthete: art and politics in the world of Amélie Nothomb, Anna Kemp19. Conclusion, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye

Women Writing War focuses on the life-writing of the moudjahidate, the women veterans of the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962). The author offers close readings of memoir, testimonial, poetry and drama by Jacqueline Guerroudj, Louisette Ighilahriz, Anna Gréki, Zhor Zerari and Myriam Ben, all of whom are documented moudjahidate and self-identify as Algerian. Reading their life-writing through the prism of theories of intertextuality, ‘minor’ literature and the dialectics of memory and trauma, the author explores the relationship between writing, resistance and political action. Since they compose their work in the first-person voice in the context of the Algerian war, this book argues that their writing operates collectively as a form of counterdiscourse, opening up a textual space where experiences that were previously silenced or marginalized might be expressed.

Experiment and Experience is a collection of critical essays on twenty-first-century women-authored literature in France. In particular, the volume focuses on how contemporary women’s writing engages creatively with socio-political issues and real-life experiences. Authors covered include well-established names, the ‘new generation’ of writers who first came to the fore of the French literary scene in the 1990s and whose work has now matured into an important œuvre, as well as new emerging writers of the 2000s, whose work is already attracting scholarly and critical attention. Within the overarching theme of ‘experiment and experience’, the contributors explore a range of issues: identities, family relations, violence, borders and limits, and the environment. They consider fiction, autobiography, writing for the theatre, autofiction and other hybrid genres and forms. Their analyses highlight difficult issues, refreshing perspectives and exciting new themes at the start of the new millennium and moving forward into the coming decades.

This book explores the different treatment of writing by women andwriting by men in twenty-first-century Spain. Focusing on contemporarySpanish authors Ana María Matute (1926–2014), Rosa Montero (1952–),and Lucía Etxebarria (1966–), the author examines how Spanish womenwriters are marketed in Spain and, in particular, how current marketingstrategies reinforce traditional structures of femininity.Through an analysis of their work and lives in the context of the FrancoRegime, the Transition to democracy and contemporary Spain, this bookprovides an innovative study of the construction of the public personaeof these key female writers. As social media and the internet transformauthors’ relationship with their readers, the rapidly shifting publishingindustry offers an important context for the difficult balance betweenhigh levels of reception and visibility and the persistence of traditionalgender stereotypes.