Kathryn Robson – författare

‘Making original use of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of "minor literature" and its power to shift boundaries and enable new forms of becoming, Roberto Binetti reads the work of Italian women poets who transform the contours of lyric poetry and its political valencies. An exemplary account of how new lyric voices can break down binary oppositions while finding different forms of subjectification and self-representation.’ – Jonathan Culler, Cornell University Poetics of Becoming: Women’s Poetry in Italy’s Long Seventies explores the work of Elsa Morante, Amelia Rosselli, Patrizia Cavalli, and Biancamaria Frabotta, examining how their poetry redefined lyric subjectivity in 1970s Italy. Engaging with feminist theory and cultural history, the book interrogates the category of scrittura femminile and its limitations, considering how these poets navigated questions of political agency, heterodox experimentalism, and marginalization within a male-dominated literary canon. Through close readings and comparative analysis, it highlights their responses to the feminist movement, postwar Italian politics, and philosophical debates. The study argues that their poetry enacts a process of ‘becoming’, destabilizing fixed identities and expanding the boundaries of lyric expression as a site of both resistance and renewal. Poetics of Becoming reimagines the relationship between gender, politics, and poetics, offering a new framework for understanding women's poetry in modern Italy.

Happiness (and the question of how to define, measure and facilitate it) has become a key theme in political, economic and social discourses in recent decades in France and elsewhere, yet research on happiness in French culture and film has been limited. Given that happiness is clearly gendered, this book looks critically at the ways in which contemporary French women’s writing and film give voice to and critique conceptions of happiness. Analysing French and francophone women’s writing (including Nina Bouraoui, Hélène Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Camille Laurens, Leïla Slimani, Delphine de Vigan) and film (including Claire Denis, Céline Sciamma and Agnès Varda), I focus on five main areas: images of happiness in consumer and Internet culture; happiness and intimacy in the family and the home; queering happiness; migrated happiness, and happiness and ageing. Whilst the ‘happiness turn’ is problematic, the desire for happiness, however fraught, matters and I show how representations of happiness in contemporary French women’s writing and film offer alternative conceptions of happiness that enable us to rethink happiness in more critical, diverse and inclusive terms.

Anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and troubled relationships with food and bodies have been depicted by writers across a variety of languages and cultures, since before the medicalisation of eating disorders in the late nineteenth century to the present day. This cross-cultural volume explores the fictional portrayal of these self-destructive yet arguably self-empowering behaviours in contemporary French, German and Italian womens writing. Covering autobiography, fiction and autofiction, the chapters included here outline different aspects of the cultural encodings of anorexia in Europe today. Contributors analyse how literary texts not only recount but also interrogate wider cultural representations of eating disorders, particularly with regard to concepts of (gender) identity, the body, the relationship with the mother, and the relation between food and words. This volume seeks to draw out the multiple meanings of anorexia as both a rebellion against and conformity to dominant (and gendered) socio-political structures. It explores the ways in which contemporary womens novels and memoirs both describe and, importantly, also redefine eating disorders in present-day Europe.