Siobhán McIlvanney – författare

In this first critical study in English to focus exclusively on Annie Ernaux’s writing trajectory, Siobhán McIlvanney provides a stimulating and challenging analysis of Ernaux’s individual texts. Following a broadly feminist hermeneutic, this study engages in a series of provocative close readings of Ernaux’s works in a move to highlight the contradictions and nuances in her writing, and to demonstrate the intellectual intricacies of her literary project. By so doing, it seeks to introduce new readers to Ernaux’s works, while engaging on less familiar terrain those already familiar with her writing.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.In this original study, Siobhán McIlvanney examines the beginnings of the women’s press in France. Figurations of the Feminine is the first work in English to assess the most significant publications which make up this diverse, yet critically neglected, medium. It traces the evolving representations of womanhood that appear over the first ninety years of women’s journals in France. McIlvanney’s insightful readings demonstrate that these journals are often characterised by a remarkable degree of ‘feminist’ content. This refutes the general conception of the women’s press as an idealised, hyper-feminised space inhabited by the intellectually idle – whether in the form of readers or writers – disseminating and legitimating a limited range of patriarchal stereotypes and idées reçues. Through textual analyses of different ‘generic’ subsections, whether the literary journal, the fashion magazine, the domestic press or more explicitly politicised outputs, Figurations of the Feminine challenges the critical commonplaces which have been applied to the women’s press since its genesis, both in France and elsewhere. It demonstrates the political richness of this medium and the privileged perspectives it gives us on female self-expression and on the everyday lives of French women from across the class spectrum during this key historical period.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.In this original study, Siobhán McIlvanney examines the beginnings of the women’s press in France. Figurations of the Feminine is the first work in English to assess the most significant publications which make up this diverse, yet critically neglected, medium. It traces the evolving representations of womanhood that appear over the first ninety years of women’s journals in France. McIlvanney’s insightful readings demonstrate that these journals are often characterised by a remarkable degree of ‘feminist’ content. This refutes the general conception of the women’s press as an idealised, hyper-feminised space inhabited by the intellectually idle – whether in the form of readers or writers – disseminating and legitimating a limited range of patriarchal stereotypes and idées reçues. Through textual analyses of different ‘generic’ subsections, whether the literary journal, the fashion magazine, the domestic press or more explicitly politicised outputs, Figurations of the Feminine challenges the critical commonplaces which have been applied to the women’s press since its genesis, both in France and elsewhere. It demonstrates the political richness of this medium and the privileged perspectives it gives us on female self-expression and on the everyday lives of French women from across the class spectrum during this key historical period.

The women represented in this volume as both authors and protagonists exert power by resisting the social paradigms that govern how they ‘should’ behave – by thwarting expectations of typical ‘feminine’ conduct (whether in relation to female corporeality and sexuality) or by their (non)adherence to the institutions of marriage and motherhood. However, they also claim power by espousing more conventionally ‘feminine’ roles, recuperating and revaluing those that entail caring and nurturing. They emphasise, in ways consistent with the growing body of feminist work on care relations, the positive, life-affirming potential that such roles embody. This volume focuses on women who, through smaller and larger acts of empowerment, seek to exert influence over their life choices. Its diverse contributions acknowledge the contextual, historical and intersectional specificities governing every woman’s power to choose her own present and future, and the important role played by even incremental changes in contributing to a greater sense of personal independence and self-knowledge, without which there can be no meaningful political change.

The women represented in this volume as both authors and protagonists exert power by resisting the social paradigms that govern how they ‘should’ behave – by thwarting expectations of typical ‘feminine’ conduct (whether in relation to female corporeality and sexuality) or by their (non)adherence to the institutions of marriage and motherhood. However, they also claim power by espousing more conventionally ‘feminine’ roles, recuperating and revaluing those that entail caring and nurturing. They emphasise, in ways consistent with the growing body of feminist work on care relations, the positive, life-affirming potential that such roles embody. This volume focuses on women who, through smaller and larger acts of empowerment, seek to exert influence over their life choices. Its diverse contributions acknowledge the contextual, historical and intersectional specificities governing every woman’s power to choose her own present and future, and the important role played by even incremental changes in contributing to a greater sense of personal independence and self-knowledge, without which there can be no meaningful political change.