Helen Vassallo Knihy

Critical responses to Jeanne Hyvrard have generally categorised her as a writer of ‘écriture féminine’ and/or autobiography, due to salient features of her œuvre such as the use of first-person narrative, a cyclic writing style, and the quest for a ‘female’ language. Within these broader considerations, however, a recurrent motif throughout Hyvrard’s writing is that of the body, specifically the female body, represented as suffering from different forms of physical/mental illness and emotional/social malaise. It is this primordial aspect of Hyvrard’s work, on which surprisingly little critical analysis has been written, that this monograph explores. It has been demonstrated that Hyvrard’s works can be studied as a unity as well as individually, given that all of her texts form part of her wider theory. While this theory is often referred to in abstract terms as ‘pensée ronde’, ‘pensée globale’ or ‘pensée-femme’, this study shows that it can be more specifically highlighted as a theory of dis(-)ease (i. e. the intertwining of physical malady and social malaise, medical terms and metaphor), and, particularly, as a social theory of the dis(-)eased female body.

Focusing on inclusivity in UK translated literature, this work explores unconscious bias regarding women in translation. It highlights the role of translators as both activists and agents, emphasizing how new theoretical models can drive significant changes within the industry. By addressing these biases, the book aims to foster a more equitable literary landscape.

Vassallo brings together the work of Nina Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar. Both authors are half French and half Algerian and each author's work returns unfailingly to the legacy of opposition engendered by the colonial past that France and Algeria share. The omnipresence of the Algerian War is conceptualized here as "embodied memory," a corporeal impulse to write about a war whose legacy is transmitted to these "second-generation" writers rather than a conscious decision to engage with the historical aspect of their personal heritage. Both authors suffer a culturally imposed "de-territorialization" in their life and their early autobiographical narratives

Discussions of French ‘identity’ have frequently emphasised the importance of a highly centralised Republican model inherited from the Revolution. In reality, however, France also has a rich heritage of diversity that has often found expression in contingent sub-cultures marked by marginalisation and otherness – whether social, religious, gendered, sexual, linguistic or ethnic. This range of sub-cultures and variety of ways of thinking the ‘other’ underlines the fact that ‘norms’ can only exist by the concomitant existence of difference(s). The essays in this collection, which derive from the conference ‘Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in Modern and Contemporary Francophone Contexts’, held at the University of Exeter in September 2007, explore various aspects of this diversity in French and Francophone literature, culture, and cinema from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The contributions demonstrate that while alienation (from a cultural ‘norm’ and also from oneself) can certainly be painful and problematic, it is also a privileged position which allows the ‘étranger’ to consider the world and his/her relationship to it in an ‘other’ way.