The Second World War and the German Occupation continue to be a major focal point in French culture and society, with new and sometimes controversial titles appearing every year - Irene Nemirovsky's Suite francaise and Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes, both rapidly translated into English, offer just two examples of this significant phenomenon in the last decade. There has, however, been no major critical reappraisal of narratives of war and occupation in France for over two decades.
Gathering within one volume studies of genres, visual cultures, chronology, narrative theory, and a...

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...