'Nina Bouraoui, Autofiction and the Search for Selfhood' Published

Tuesday 13 December 2016

Bouraoui Volume CoverThe motif of the ‘identity quest’ features strongly in much contemporary French women’s writing, but nowhere more so than in the work of French-Algerian author Nina Bouraoui. Author of numerous books since 1991 and winner of the 2005 Prix Renaudot, Bouraoui persistently explores the question of self-expression in her work, experimenting with a variety of self-representational modes and emphasising the importance of language to the construction of her sense of self.

Considering the textual identities produced through Bouraoui’s work in the period 1999–2011, Rosie MacLachlan's book examines how self-referential writing can represent a crucial act of resistance to a number of contemporary problems, including race, gender and social isolation. Using the work of Monique Wittig and Judith Butler to theorise the transformative potential of the literary text, MacLachlan proposes autofiction as a uniquely unrestricted space which, for writers such as Bouraoui, may provide the only medium through which to formulate a coherent and manageable sense of self.

Rosie MacLachlan lectures in learning development in London and southeast England, specialising in the teaching of language and literacy in higher education. She completed an MSt in Modern Languages at St John’s College, University of Oxford, and a PhD in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin.

This is the fifth volume in the ‘Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing’ book series, published by Peter Lang in association with the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing.