Hannah Thompson – författare

Get to grips with set texts and be fully prepared for the AS/A Level exam with the Modern Languages Oxford Literature Companions. The Companions are written by experienced lecturers, teachers and examiners and provide comprehensive coverage of characters, themes, plot, language and context with activities in French to consolidate your knowledge of the text. There are also extensive sections on exam preparation and response planning, with a bank of annotated sample answers and practice questions. This guide covers No et moi by Delphine de Vigan. Modern Languages Oxford Literature Companions are also available for selected Spanish and German set texts.

This book mobilizes the unexplored interpretative and critical potential of the taboo as a way of reading accounts of the body in nineteenth-century French fiction. It shows that the taboo bodies hidden in realist texts are amongst their most articulate.

This book argues that the most interesting depictions of blindness in French fiction are those which call into question and ultimately undermine the prevailing myths and stereotypes of blindness which dominate Western thought.

References to clothing in the nineteenth-century naturalist novel have traditionally been read merely as examples of descriptive detail. Thompson, in her groundbreaking study on Zola, rescues clothing from the margins of representation, and draws on a wide range of twentieth-century feminist and queer theory to demonstrate that clothing troubles such binary pairs as 'masculine' and 'feminine', 'normal' and 'perverse', 'natural' and 'artificial' that lie at the foundations of Zolian naturalism. The author's investment in the signifying power of clothing in the Rougon-Macquart is such that the novels can no longer be read as unproblematic illustrations of literary naturalism; in fact its intensity demands that Zola's relationship to literature and his descriptions of Second Empire society be reassessed.