Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec

ISBN-13: 9780773524873 / Angielski / Miękka / 2003 / 384 str.

Milena Santoro

Opis

This work draws together innovative works of fiction written by French and Quebec feminists in the mid-1970s. Through an analysis of the strategies adopted by Helene Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard and Jeanne Hyvrard as they rework maternal and (pro)creative metaphors and play with language and conventions of genre, Milena Santoro identifies a transatlantic community of women writers who share a subversive aesthetic that participates in, even as it transforms, the tradition of the avant-garde in 20th-century literature. Santoro elucidates notoriously difficult works by the four mothers of invention studied - Cixous and Hyvrard from France, and Gagnon and Brossard from Quebec - showing how the rethinking of images associated with femininity and motherhood, a disruptive approach to language, and a subversive relation to novelistic conventions characterize these writers' search for a writing that will best express women's desires and dreams.