Situated at an intersection of feminist critical practice in the United States and feminist cultural theory in France, Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader is an investigation of the way in which this French New Novelist's first eight works, in their increasing dramatization of the issue of reading, problematize certain feminist literary analyses, especially in relation to "l'ecriture feminine." After an exploration of the difficulty Sarraute's writing poses for the critical enterprise through a lengthy reading of Sarrautien criticism in the U.S. and France, Sarah Barbour shows how Sarraute's works eventually prohibit any fixed reading and open up instead a space in which we as readers are moved toward a more personal understanding of our use of narrative and of socio-sexual constructs in the continual, day-to-day constitution and reconstitution of subjectivity. Nathalie Sarraute conceives of the evolution of the novel as a movement through history and thus situates her work within a tradition of psychological realism at the same time that she proposes radical innovations of the tradition. Her novels do not discard or revise past works but rather internalize them in an effort to expand the notion of what is possible for psychological realism. This study takes as its model Sarraute's example of simultaneity, which invites an understanding of time both as a diachronic movement through "phases, ": from the psychological realism of Dostoyevski to that of Kafka to her own, and as a synchronic encounter that elicits simultaneous relationships to different "phases." Within the movement of feminist literary criticism scholars have often discerned what are also referred to as "phases;" that is, criticism in the United States has moved from its initial concern with images of women in fiction by male writers to a desire to establish a feminine tradition of women's writing. Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader is not an attempt to claim that Sarraute's work represents "ecriture feminine." Reading Sarraute's novels in their "evolution," Sarah Barbour has found that they forced her own reading and understanding of this term to "evolve." She therefore proposes that the novels open up a space that is beyond the frozen shells of gender, which continue to bind women and men personally and critically. The power of Sarraute's work lies in the solitary experience of our encounter with her presentation and perception of reality. In this encounter we are forced to experience the fluid nature of subjectivity; that is, to internalize and explore differences within personal and sexual identity that, by extension, affect the identity of larger political movements.

The Nouveau Roman writers have been actively involved in the theory as well as the practice of fiction, participating in a series of vigorous debates on issues such as the political significance of literature, formalism and structuralism, the status of the author, etc. This study discusses Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Simon, Butor and Ricardou, analysing both the interaction of their own theory and fiction and their reactions to the work of figures such as Sartre, Barthes, Lvi-Strauss, Sollers and Kristeva.

Marie de France, Mme. De Sävignä, and Mme. De Lafayette achieved international reputations during periods when women in other European countries were able to write only letters, translations, religious tracts, and miscellaneous fragments. There were obstacles, but French women writers were more or less sustained and empowered by the French culture. Often unconventional in their personal lives and occupied with careers besides writing?as educators, painters, actresses, preachers, salon hostesses, labor organizers?these women did not wait for Simone de Beauvoir to tell them to make existential choices and have "projects in the world." French Women Writers describes the lives and careers of fifty-two literary figures from the twelfth century to the late twentieth. All the contributors are recognized authorities. Some of their subjects, like Colette and George Sand, are celebrated, and others are just now gaining critical notice. From Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre to Rachilde and Häl_ne Cixous, from Louise Labe to Marguerite Duras?these women speak through the centuries to issues of gender, sexuality, and language. French Women Writers now becomes widely available in this Bison Book edition.

MLN pioneered the introduction of contemporary continental criticism into American scholarship. Critical studies in the modern languages--Italian, Hispanic, German, French--and recent work in comparative literature are the basis for articles and notes in MLN. Four single-language issues and one comparative literature issue are published each year.

This collection of essays addresses the question of lucidity as a thematic in literature and film but also as a quality of both expression and insight in literary criticism and critical thought more generally. The essays offer treatments of lucidity in itself and in relation to its opposites, forms of obscurity and darkness. They offer attention to problems of philosophical thought and reason, to questions of literary and poetic form, and of photographic and filmic contemplation. Ranging from engagements with early modern writing through to more recent material the contributions focus in particular on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French prose and poetry, the field which has been the predominant focus of Alison Finch’s critical writing. They are written as tributes to the distinctively lucid insights of her work and to the breadth and clarity of its intellectual engagement.

A study of a female style of writing. French, English and American theories of how women's creative imagination and use of language may differ from conventional literary norms are examined in relation to the work of five of the best 20th century French women writers.

Nathalie Sarraute (1900–99) is regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century. Initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, she has come to be regarded as an important author in her own right with her own distinctive concerns. In this major 2000 study of Sarraute, the first in English since her death, Ann Jefferson offers a fresh perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre - her novels, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings - by focusing on the crucial issue of difference which emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Jefferson explores Sarraute's fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds including questions of gender and genre. She argues that difference is simultaneously asserted and denied in Sarraute's work, and that the notion of difference, so often celebrated by other writers and thinkers, is shown in Sarraute's work to the inseparable from ambiguity and anxiety.