This volume explores contemporary French women's writing through the prism of one of the defining moments of modern feminism: the writings of the 1970s that came to be known as "French feminism". With their exhilarating renewal of the rules of fiction, and a sophisticated theoretical approach to gender, representation and textuality, Helene Cixous and others became internationally recognised for their work, at a time when the women's movement was also a driving force for social change. Taking its cue from Les Femmes s'entetent, a multi-authored analysis of the situation of women and a...

This is the first book to study the middlebrow novel in France. Middlebrow is a derogatory word that connotes blandness, mediocrity and a failed aspiration to `high' culture. However, when appropriated as a positive term to denote that wide swathe of literature between the challenging experimentalism of the high and the formulaic tendency of the popular, it enables a rethinking of the literary canon from the point of view of what most readers actually read, a criterion curiously absent from dominant definitions of literary value. Since women have long formed a majority of the reading public,...