First Volumes in 'Studies in Contemporary Womens Writing' Series Published

Tuesday 10 September 2013

The first two volumes in the new series 'Studies in Contemporary Women's Writing', published by Peter Lang in association with the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing, have now appeared.

Experiment and Experience: Women's Writing in France 2000-2010 is edited by Gill Rye and Amaleena Damlé (vol. 1)
The volume brings together a collection of critical essays on 21st-century women-authored literature in France, and focuses on how contemporary women’s writing engages creatively with socio-political issues and real-life experiences. Authors covered include well-established names, the ‘new generation’ of writers who first came to the fore of the French literary scene in the 1990s and whose work has now matured into an important oeuvre, as well as new emerging writers of the 2000s, whose work is already attracting scholarly and critical attention. Within the overarching theme of ‘experiment and experience’, the contributors explore a range of issues: identities, family relations, violence, borders and limits, and the environment. They consider fiction, autobiography, writing for the theatre, autofiction and other hybrid genres and forms. Their analyses highlight difficult issues, refreshing perspectives and exciting new themes at the start of the new millennium and moving forward into the coming decades.
Contents (pdf)

Representing Repulsion: The Aesthetics of Disgust in Contemporary Women's Writing in French and German by Katie Jones (vol. 2)
Disgust is a strong, immediate visceral reaction. While it may feel like a purely instinctive response, the cultural meanings ascribed to particular objects, bodies or behaviours play a significant role in determining whether or not they are experienced as disgusting. This interplay between bodies and ideas makes disgust a powerful source of metaphor in narrative fiction. For women’s writing, disgust is particularly problematic due to a misogynistic tradition in which the female body has often been coded as disgusting. This book offers a comparative study of recently published texts by eight female authors writing in French and German – Marie Darrieussecq, Amélie Nothomb, Lorette Nobécourt, Alina Reyes, Sibylle Berg, Jenny Erpenbeck, Monika Maron and Charlotte Roche – in terms of an aesthetics of disgust and asks to what extent disgust can be seen as a useful tool for feminist criticism. Since the late 1990s there have been increasing levels of academic interest in disgust in various disciplines, ranging from clinical psychology to aesthetics and moral philosophy. As one of the first full-length studies to consider literary uses of disgust, this book both contributes to the emerging field of disgust theory and offers a new contribution to the study of women’s writing.
Contents (pdf)