This rich anthology of writings in French by twentieth-century women presents a dazzling array of literary treasures. The editors, all distinguished specialists in French studies, have expanded the boundaries of French literary terrain beyond France, Belgium, and Switzerland to North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and French Canada. These compelling poems, short stories, essays, memoirs, and novels (some complete and others excerpts), represent thirty-one contemporary authors, including Colette, Mariama Ba, Maryse Conde, Joyce Mansour, Renee Vivien, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hebert....

In Women and Narrative Identity Green demonstrates that the "national text" has at times functioned to constrain women's literary expression, while in other cases it has empowered the feminine voice, endowing it with a unique identitary power. She shows that writers such as Laure Conan, Germaine Guevremont, Gabrielle Roy, Anne Hebert, and Marie-Claire Blais have been recognized as important because they have been widely perceived as speaking to and about the people of Quebec. The Quebec identity narrative has offered women writers a framework within which they are able not only to make their...

Using the tools of contemporary feminist criticism and building on a tradition of work on Quebec women's writing, Mary Jean Green considers issues of national and cultural self-definition, situating the literary texts of Quebec women within a unique political and historical context while also relating them to the work of women writing in other cultural situations, from nineteenth-century Europe to the postcolonial francophone world.