Women's Writing in Western Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy

by Adalgisa Giorgio (Editor), Julia Waters (Editor)

'Covering an enormous range or writers and national traditions, 'Gender, Generation, Legacy' attests to the vibrancy and the currency of feminist criticism and theory in the new Europe. These essays give us new paradigms to think and read with in the future.' Professor Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University, New York. 'Thirty years after the creative outburst of women's writing and feminist theory of the early 1970s, can we still speak of a women's tradition of writing, of gender and generation, of the iconic role of the mother figure ? This dense and wide ranging collection of essays engages with the dynamics of legacy and conflict, of recognition and denial, to map out some of the many complex strands and relationships marking the textual relations of women's writing across time and geographic boundaries. No simple tradition of women s writing emerges, but the powerful hold exerted by some of the most canonical writers Beauvoir, Woolf, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Rich and the evidence of the construction of new relationships between and across texts by women points to a continuing network of transmission in which women s texts are enmeshed. This is an important collection and a large readership will be grateful for this probing of issues which are at the heart of the reading of women s writing.' Professor Elizabeth Fallaize, St. John's College Oxford

460 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2007