Books in the Studies in Contemporary Women's Writing series

Anorexia, bulimia and binge eating are the topics explored by contemporary writers in this volume on French, German and Italian women's writing. Eating disorders are presented as both a rebellion against and a conformity to gendered societal norms, helping to describe and redefine their portrayal in present-day Europe.

Strange Adventures examines portrayals of womanhood in the works of prize-winning French author Pierrette Fleutiaux. Throughout, Fleutiaux's depictions are shown to pose a challenge to existing conceptions of womanhood and individuality, thus opening up new understandings of what it means to be a woman, and to be human.

Experiment and Experience is a collection of critical essays on twenty-first-century women-authored literature in France. In particular, the volume focuses on how contemporary women's writing engages creatively with socio-political issues and real-life experiences. Topics include identities, family relations, violence, borders and the environment.

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, Amelie Nothomb, Lorette Nobecourt, 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.

The decision to reject motherhood is the subject of several key works of literature in French since the new millennium. This book looks at first-person accounts of voluntary childlessness by women writing in French. The book explores how women narrate their decision not to mother, the issues that they face in doing so and the narrative techniques that they employ to justify their stories. It asks how these authors challenge stereotypes of the childless woman by claiming their own identity in narrative, publicly proclaiming their right to choose and writing a femininity that is not connected to motherhood. Using feminist, sociological and psychoanalytic theories to interrogate non-mothering, this work is the first book-length study of narratives that counter this long-standing taboo. It brings together authors who stake out a new terrain, creating a textual space in which to take ownership of their childlessness and call for new understandings of female identity beyond maternity.

Author of numerous books since 1991 and winner of the 2005 Prix Renaudot, Nina Bouraoui persistently explores the question of self-expression in her work. This study of Bouraoui's work examines how self-referential writing can represent a crucial act of resistance to a number of contemporary problems, including race, gender and social isolation.

Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996) is increasingly regarded as a central figure in modern Italian literature. This study follows her autofictional journey, identifying themes in her work such as freedom, the body, gender and sexuality, political commitment and social transformation.