This collection of essays offers a wide variety of literatures, critical approaches, and perspectives. The articles are distributed as follows: eight on French literature, two on the literature written in French from QuÈbec, six on Latin-American, and five on German and Austrian literatures.

Women in exile disrupt assumptions about exile, belonging, home and identity. For many women exiles, home represents less a place of belonging and more a point of departure, and exile becomes a creative site of becoming, rather than an unsettling state of errancy. Exile may be a propitious circumstance for women to renegotiate identities far from the strictures of home, appropriating a new freedom in mobility. Through a feminist politics of place, displacement and subjectivity, this comparative study analyses the novels of key contemporary Francophone and Latin American writers Nancy Huston, Linda Le, Malika Mokeddem, Cristina Peri Rossi, Laura Restrepo, and Cristina Siscar to identify a new nomadic subjectivity in the lives and works of transnational women today.

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a «boom» in the production, publication, readership, and scholarship of women's writing from Latin America. In fact, the emergence of women writers is perhaps the most significant phenomenon of the «post-boom» period of Latin American literary history, a phenomenon that has been influenced in turn by the burgeoning development of a number of women's movements on the continent. Within this «boom», the short story has become an increasingly popular genre amongst women writers. This book considers the location(s) of four major women writers - Cristina Peri Rossi, Rosario Ferré, Albalucía Angel, and Isabel Allende - and their short fiction within these changing literary and social contexts. Combining close textual analysis of their fiction with a consideration of the social, historical, and geographical contexts of literary production, this book is essential reading for students and scholars in Latin American studies, women's studies, and comparative literature.

Under the assumed name Rachilde, Marguerite Eymery (1860?1953) wrote over sixty works of fiction, drama, poetry, memoir, and criticism, including Monsieur Vänus, one of the most famous examples of decadent fiction. She was closely associated with the literary journal Mercure de France, inspired parts of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and mingled with all the literary lights of the day. Yet for all that, very little has been written about her. Melanie C. Hawthorne corrects this oversight and counters the traditional approach to Rachilde by persuasively portraying this "eccentric" as patently representative of the French women writers of her time and of the social and literary issues they faced. Seen in this light, Rachilde's writing clearly illustrates important questions in feminist literary theory as well as significant features of turn-of-the-century French society. ø Hawthorne arranges her approach to Rachilde around several defining events in the author's life, including the controversial publication of Monsieur Vänus, with its presentation of sex reversals. Weaving back and forth in time, she is able to depict these moments in relation to Rachilde's life, work, and times and to illuminate nineteenth-century publishing practices and rivalries, including authorial manipulations of the market for sexually suggestive literature. The most complete and accurate account yet written of this emblematic author, Hawthorne's work is also the first to situate Rachilde in the broader social contexts and literary currents of her time and of our own.

This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration. Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.

This book provides a much needed grouping of Latin-American women, emphasizing their differences—the diversity of their cultural backgrounds, socio-economic conditions, and literary strategies—as well as their commonalities. Humble writers of the Spanish and Portuguese testimonio and sophisticated postmodernist authors alike are contextualized within a "matriheritage of founding discourses."