A New Generation: Sex, Gender, and Creativity in Contemporary Women's Writing in French, and: Hybrid Voices, Hybrid Texts: Women's Writing at the Turn of the Millennium (review)

These special issues on new women's writing in French provide consistently illuminating coverage of a vibrant, rapidly evolving field of inquiry. They contain analyses by scholars from the UK, France, Hungary, the US, Canada and New Zealand, providing a total of twenty-two articles which explore the work of twenty-one writers, sometimes in studies devoted to a single author, sometimes (in the 2005 collection) within comparative frameworks. Both issues deal with texts published since the mid-1990s and prioritize the new generation of writers, although recent writing by established figures (Hélène Cixous, Paule Constant, Assia Djebar) is also analysed in the 2004 work. In each collection, a degree of thematic coherence lightly links the essays, pointing to productive readings between texts and writers and contributing to the emergence and consolidation of key issues in the field. Thus readers are drawn to appreciate diversity, yet still to hold to the important idea of a 'body' of recent work by women which attains collective significance. Francophone women writers and issues of cultural identity receive special consideration in the 2004 issue, whose potentially tendentious umbrella concept, 'hybridity', is appropriately situated by the editor in her preface. This provides a succinct snap-shot of contemporary postcolonial sensitivities, raising competing interpretations of the term before going on to celebrate hybridity as a positive dynamic. Cultural hybridity, as well as the issue of its interface with gender issues, is addressed most directly in essays on, for example, Bessora, Assia Djebar and Malika Mokeddem, while a more generalized sense of hybridity (of textual form, genre, narrative voice, and so on) underpins essays on Lorette Nobécourt, Maryline Desbiolles, Christine Angot and others. Highlights include studies of Bessora's ludic propensities (Susan Ireland), Cixous's autobiographical turns (Claire Boyle) and Angot's cultivation of readerly doubt (Gill Rye), but all articles are strong and original. The more eclectic 2005 special issue gathers studies of fictional, autobiographical and autofictional writings which cover many of the recurring preoccupations that distinguish new women's writing of the period: motherhood and mother/daughter relations; adolescence; sexual pleasures and practices; trauma, writing and survival; and, consistently, identity, generic inventiveness and writing tout court. This collection's forcefully persuasive readings include Sarah Cooper's analysis of Catherine Cusset's textual/sexual flânerie; Marie-Claire Barnet's effervescent illumination of Régine Detambel; and several (highly productive) comparative pieces such as studies of sexuality in Virginie Despentes and Calixthe Beyala (Claudia Martinek), of writing and fin-de-siècle survival in Marie Darrieussecq and Jacqueline Harpman (Lorie Sauble-Otto), of mothering in Angot and Darrieussecq (Rye), and of love and romance in Camille Laurens and Alina Reyes (Diana Holmes). That a collection of essays so attentive to the challenges of adventurous, often abrasive writings about sex and sexuality should close as it does on a probing inquiry about the re-appropriation of romance in new women's writing, constitutes a suggestive strategy. It underlines the dialogic relations at work as new women's writing situates itself with regard to its heritage, and confirms the richly innovative range not only of the writings studied here, but also of scholarship about them.