In Packaging Post/Coloniality, Richard Watts breaks from convention and reads Francophone books by their covers, focusing on the package over the content. Watts looks at the ways that the "paratext"--the covers, illustrations, promotional summaries, epigraphs, dedications, and prefaces or forewords that enclose the text--mediates creative works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia whose place in the French literary institution was and remains a source of conflict. In order to be acceptable for French bookstore shelves, the novels, essays, and...

Through the study of Charles Testut's Le Vieux Salomon, a nineteenth-century southern Francophone antislavery novel, this book encourages a reassessment of the southern experience and of the canon of southern literature. Abel argues that Testut's distinctiveness lies in his French intellectual heritage and in his awareness of the rich historical and cultural links between the ethnic legacies of Louisiana and the French Caribbean. Le Vieux Salomon is marked by a sense of place through the author's identification with two regions colonized by the French and which are symbolically represented in...

Time Signatures engages in a close study of the autobiographical writings of three contemporary Francophone writers from the Maghreb: Assia Djebar, Helene Cixous, and Abdelkebir Khatibi. Alluding to music not only as a "theme" pulsing throughout these writers' works, but also as a means of comprehending their unique, improvisational writing styles, Alison Rice offers readers a new and beautifully constructed way of reading these authors' texts by demonstrating that the form adopted to address topics of concern is as significant as the content itself. The voice of Jacques Derrida intermingles...

Stephanie Corinna Bille, a Swiss short-story writer, playwright, poet, and novelist and winner of the 1975 French Prix Concourt, is often considered the major contemporary Franco-Swiss woman writer. As a writer, Bille excelled at rendering the woman's experience. She stands out as an elegant writer, a compassionate observer of early twentieth-century Catholic rural life, and a precise painter of the beauty of the natural environment. In over thirty volumes of creative writing, she favored short narrative forms from five lines to eighty pages, exploiting her dreams and fantasies in the wake of...