In the 1990s the French literary arena was enlivened by the emergence of a new generation of women writers. This book selects six of its most distinctive voices and addresses important questions about the very new in French women's writing. What are young women choosing to write about? What do they tell us about changing perceptions of feminine identities? What does it mean to write (and to read) as women at the start of the new millennium? An introductory chapter explores key issues such as the woman writer in the public imagination and continuity and change within French women's writing since the 1970s. It also highlights thematic threads which recur across the work of the authors studied: history and time, wandering and exile, self and other, the body and sexuality and writing and telling. The remaining chapters propose productive approaches to the fictional worlds of Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Marie Ndiaye, Agnès Desarthe, Lorette Nobécourt and Amélie Nothomb through close readings of their most challenging, popular or telling texts. They focus on perennial preoccupations in women's writing which are given new treatment by these writers and discuss important developments such as uses of the pornographic, myth and fairy tale and parody and irony in new women's writing.

Includes chapters on Marie Cardinal, Chantal Chawaf, Annie Ernaux, Claire Etcherelli, Jeanne Hyvrard, Annie Leclerc, Marie Redonnet and women's writing in the 1970s and 1980s.

The increase in the visibility of autobiographies and fiction recounting suffering has gone hand-in-hand with an emphasis on the possibilities and limits of empathy. Contemporary French women's writing interrogates the imperative to witness and respond to another subject's pain and raises questions about the relation between empathy and reading.

In its six case studies, The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France works out a model for (early modern) gender, which is articulated in the introduction. The book comprises essays on the construction of women: three in texts by male and three by female writers, including Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre, in the first part; La Guette, La Fayette and Sévigné, in the second. These studies thus also take up different genres: satire, tragedy and treatise; memoir, novella and letter-writing. Since gender is a relational construct, each chapter considers as well specific textual and contextual representations of men. In every instance, Stanton looks for signs of conformity to-and deviations from-normative gender scripts. The Dynamics of Gender adds a new dimension to early modern French literary and cultural studies: it incorporates a dynamic (shifting) theory of gender, and it engages both contemporary critical theory and literary historical readings of primary texts and established concepts in the field. This book emphasizes the central importance of historical context and close reading from a feminist perspective, which it also interrogates as a practice. The Afterword examines some of the meanings of reading-as-a-feminist.

Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes a crucial contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light the hitherto unrecognised literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.

Mothers have been both idealized and demonized in Western cultures. With Simone de Beauvoir's feminist analysis of motherhood in The Second Sex as her point of departure, Rye (Germanic and Romance studies, U. of London) studies how French autobiographical and fictional narratives of mothering since 1990 differ from those told about them. In the context of societal changes, she explores themes including loss and trauma related to childbirth literally and figuratively, ambivalence and guilt, power and powerlessness, and lesbian and single parenting in the works of Christine Angot, Genevieve Brisac, Marie Darrieussecq, Camille Laurens, Leila Marouane, and Marie Ndiaye among others.

Although more women in France have entered political life than ever before, the fact remains that there are fewer women representatives in the French parliament than there were after the Second World War. In a new and original approach, the author presents an overview and analysis of the emerging body of text by or on women who have held high political office in France. The argument is that writing about women and politics has not just described or reflected women's slow but now substantial entry into political life; it has played a major part in shaping the parity debate and its outcomes. Interviews with political women, such as Huguette Bouchardeau, Simone Veil or Edith Cresson, inserted in the text, demonstrate the emergence and circulation of a new common discourse focused on the issue of whether women in politics make or should make a difference. A close reading of the various texts examined in this book and their connection to new public counter-discourses in France suggest that a re-writing of power is indeed occurring.