"Beyond 'Ecriture feminine' is the first book to be published exploring the work of the contemporary French author Jeanne Hyvrard (1945-) from her early novels of the 1970s up to some of her most recent texts. Moving critical accounts of Hyvrard beyond a focus upon ecriture feminine, it identifies the patterns though which her writing repeats and transforms creation mythology, her own oeuvre, and her own life, examining how intertextual repetitions bind her work together into a complex and ever expanding web of allusions and resonnances which engages the reader in a process of constant re-interpretation, challenging notions of linearity and reflecting the 'chaotic' reality of life in the Hyvrardian world."--BOOK JACKET.

Written by experts in their field, this Companion surveys the challenges and provocations raised by the major voices of poststructuralism: Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Guattari, Kristeva, Irigaray, Barthes and Baudrillard. Thematically organised and clearly written, it will guide students and researchers in philosophy, literature, art, geography, politics, sociology, law, film, and cultural studies around the nature and contemporary relevance of poststructuralism.

Felski presents a critical account of current American and European feminist literary theory, and analyzes contemporary fiction by women to show that no theorist can identify a specifically "female" or "feminine" kind of writing without reference to what gender means at a given historical moment. She argues that the idea of a feminist aesthetic is a non-issue needlessly pursued by feminists. She calls for a consideration of the social and cultural context in which these texts were produced and received, and demonstrates her method of an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of literature which can integrate literary and social theory. ISBN 0-674-06894-7: $25.00; ISBN 0-674-06895-5 (pbk.): $9.95.

First published in 1999. Each volume in the Lit Book Series will contain a wide range of essays on a particular author, theme or genre. By offering a forum for oftentimes competing, but equally compelling, theoretical points of view within each volume, the editors hope to generate interest, debate, dissent, appreciation and attention for each volume’s topic. The Lit Book Series will provide a valuable venue for scholars, writers and general readers to encounter, examine, produce and discuss insightful, sound scholarship about important fields of study. This international collection of essays regards the work of Hélène Cixous with all the complexity that she herself brings to her engagement with literature and psychology. Cixous is well known as an interpreter of Freudian and Lacanian theories, especially those connecting gender and the production of language. She is also a noted writer of fiction and drama as well as a distinguished theorist of literary feminism.

Laughing with Medusa explores a series of interlinking questions, including: Does history's self-positioning as the successor of myth result in the exclusion of alternative narratives of the past? How does feminism exclude itself from certain historical discourses? Why has psychoanalysis placed myth at the centre of its explorations of the modern subject? Why are the Muses feminine? Do the categories of myth and politics intersect or are they mutually exclusive? Does feminism's recourse to myth offer a script of resistance or commit it to an ineffective utopianism? Covering a wide range of subject areas including poetry, philosophy, science, history, and psychoanalysis as well as classics, this book engages with these questions from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. It includes a specially commisssioned work of fiction, `Iphigeneia's Wedding', by the poet Elizabeth Cook.

An examination of a corpus of modern and contemporary French literature which argues for feminist theory reclaiming anti-difference and literature's revolutionary possibilities.

This collection of specially commissioned essays by academics and practising psychoanalysts, first published in 2003, explores key dimensions of Jacques Lacan's life and works. Lacan is renowned as a theoretician of psychoanalysis whose work is still influential in many countries. He refashioned psychoanalysis in the name of philosophy and linguistics at the time when it underwent a certain intellectual decline. Advocating a 'return to Freud', by which he meant a close reading in the original of Freud's works, he stressed the idea that the unconscious functions 'like a language'. All essays in this Companion focus on key terms in Lacan's often difficult and idiosyncratic developments of psychoanalysis. This volume will bring fresh, accessible perspectives to the work of this formidable and influential thinker. These essays, supported by a useful chronology and guide to further reading will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.

"Language and Sexual Difference" aims to introduce the innovative, radical, and challenging theories of French feminism to non-French speakers.

Based on research conducted in India, this book brings out the richness and variety of minority discourse across histories, cultures, and spaces. It engages with the notion(s) of the minority to interrogate stereotypes, and it draws upon verbal and cultural texts to define and develop a larger discourse that underlines the major markers of the postcolonial world. The book examines literary testimonies and art forms, both classical and modern, to explore broader areas of contestation among peoples and communities. It is dialogic in nature and comparative in its approach, and it develops theoretical parameters and puts them to test in critical practice.

The book questions patriarchy and the associated feminine power struggle. It traverses through the characters of the mythological Draupadi of the epic Mahabharat - seeing this epic through the eyes of Draupadi - and a Naxalite girl who was named after this mythological character who broke all typical stereotyped thoughts, convictions and conditioning. This book deals with gender stereotyping and breaking the bondages arising out of conditioning thereof. The detailed research done is bound to draw the attention of any reader towards the ease with which one accepts the indoctrination of stereotypical views, particularly of the feminine form as a norm. In this mundane world, where the dominating position in all subtleties is held by the MAN-kind, this book lucidly addresses questions related to feminine stereotyping. It also intrigues the reader regarding identities arising out of such conditioning.