"Beyond 'Ecriture feminine' is the first book to be published exploring the work of the contemporary French author Jeanne Hyvrard (1945-) from her early novels of the 1970s up to some of her most recent texts. Moving critical accounts of Hyvrard beyond a focus upon ecriture feminine, it identifies the patterns though which her writing repeats and transforms creation mythology, her own oeuvre, and her own life, examining how intertextual repetitions bind her work together into a complex and ever expanding web of allusions and resonnances which engages the reader in a process of constant re-interpretation, challenging notions of linearity and reflecting the 'chaotic' reality of life in the Hyvrardian world."--BOOK JACKET.

Felski presents a critical account of current American and European feminist literary theory, and analyzes contemporary fiction by women to show that no theorist can identify a specifically "female" or "feminine" kind of writing without reference to what gender means at a given historical moment. She argues that the idea of a feminist aesthetic is a non-issue needlessly pursued by feminists. She calls for a consideration of the social and cultural context in which these texts were produced and received, and demonstrates her method of an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of literature which can integrate literary and social theory. ISBN 0-674-06894-7: $25.00; ISBN 0-674-06895-5 (pbk.): $9.95.

Laughing with Medusa explores a series of interlinking questions, including: Does history's self-positioning as the successor of myth result in the exclusion of alternative narratives of the past? How does feminism exclude itself from certain historical discourses? Why has psychoanalysis placed myth at the centre of its explorations of the modern subject? Why are the Muses feminine? Do the categories of myth and politics intersect or are they mutually exclusive? Does feminism's recourse to myth offer a script of resistance or commit it to an ineffective utopianism? Covering a wide range of subject areas including poetry, philosophy, science, history, and psychoanalysis as well as classics, this book engages with these questions from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. It includes a specially commisssioned work of fiction, `Iphigeneia's Wedding', by the poet Elizabeth Cook.

An examination of a corpus of modern and contemporary French literature which argues for feminist theory reclaiming anti-difference and literature's revolutionary possibilities.

The book questions patriarchy and the associated feminine power struggle. It traverses through the characters of the mythological Draupadi of the epic Mahabharat - seeing this epic through the eyes of Draupadi - and a Naxalite girl who was named after this mythological character who broke all typical stereotyped thoughts, convictions and conditioning. This book deals with gender stereotyping and breaking the bondages arising out of conditioning thereof. The detailed research done is bound to draw the attention of any reader towards the ease with which one accepts the indoctrination of stereotypical views, particularly of the feminine form as a norm. In this mundane world, where the dominating position in all subtleties is held by the MAN-kind, this book lucidly addresses questions related to feminine stereotyping. It also intrigues the reader regarding identities arising out of such conditioning.

"Language and Sexual Difference" aims to introduce the innovative, radical, and challenging theories of French feminism to non-French speakers.