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S. Dow, Madness in Twentieth-Century French Women's Writing. Leduc, Duras, Beauvoir, Cardinal, Hyvrard

S. Dow, Madness in Twentieth-Century French Women's Writing. Leduc, Duras, Beauvoir, Cardinal, Hyvrard

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la maison d'édition)

DOW, Suzanne, Madness in Twentieth-Century French Women's Writing. Leduc, Duras, Beauvoir, Cardinal, Hyvrard, Oxford / Bern / Berlin / Bruxelles / Frankfurt am Main / New York / Wien, Peter Lang (Modern French Identities), 2009, 207 p.

ISBN 978-3-03911-540-2

RÉSUMÉ

This book offers a discussion of the trope of madness intwentieth-century French women's writing, focusing on close readings ofthe following texts: Violette Leduc's L'Asphyxie (1946), Marguerite Duras's Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), Simone de Beauvoir's 'La Femme rompue' (1967), Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire (1975), Jeanne Hyvrard's Les Prunes de Cythère (1975) and Mère la mort(1976). The discussion traces the evolution in the way madness is takenup by women authors from the key period starting just prior to theemergence of second-wave feminism and culminating at the height of the écriture féminineproject. This study argues that madness offers itself up to theseauthors as a powerful means to convey a certain ambivalence towardschanging contemporary ideas on the authority of authorship. On the onehand a highly enabling means to figure transgression, the madwoman isequally the repository for a twentieth-century 'anxiety of authorship'on the part of the woman writer.

TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Narrative's Constitutive Constraint: Violette Leduc's L'Asphyxie - Reading Dangerously: Lol V. Stein and the Ravissement du lecteur - Madness and (Self-)Deception in Simone de Beauvoir's 'La Femme rompue' - The Hysterical Text: Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire - 'Cet autre tour de folie': The Madness of Jeanne la folle.

BIOGRAPHIE

Suzanne Dow studied French literature to doctoral level at St Hilda'sCollege and subsequently St John's College, Oxford University. She hastaught twentieth-century literature, with a particular focus on women'swriting, at the University of Oxford and at the Ecole NormaleSupérieure Lettres et sciences humaines, Lyon. She is currentlylecturer in French at the University of Nottingham.