Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women's Writing

Kate Averis

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Studies In Comparative Literature 31

Legenda

1 July 2014  •  192pp

ISBN: 978-1-907975-94-3 (hardback)  •  RRP £80, $110, €95

ISBN: 978-1-315094-23-6 (Taylor & Francis ebook)

ContemporaryFrenchSpanishFiction

Women in exile disrupt assumptions about exile, belonging, home and identity. For many women exiles, home represents less a place of belonging and more a point of departure, and exile becomes a creative site of becoming, rather than an unsettling state of errancy. Exile may provide propitious circumstances for women to renegotiate identities far from the strictures of home, and to appropriate new spaces of freedom in mobility. Through a feminist politics of place, displacement and subjectivity, this comparative study analyses the novels of key contemporary Francophone and Latin American writers Nancy Huston, Linda Lê, Malika Mokeddem, Cristina Peri Rossi, Laura Restrepo, and Cristina Siscar to identify a new nomadic subjectivity in the lives and works of transnational women today.

Kate Averis is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris.

Reviews:

  • ‘Averis skilfully negotiates a corpus that encompasses six writers, two languages, and several nations in an engaging style and with careful structuring, which unfailingly maintains her reader’s engagement. This study offers a very welcome re-evaluation of exile as a linguistic, psychological, gendered, and existential site.’ — Trudy Agar, French Studies 69.4, October 2015, 560-61
  • ‘The originality and importance of this study in the field of Comparative Literature lies in the fact not only that it analyses exiled women writers (instead of exiled men writers) but also that these writers’ homelands are different, making the research findings more valid as they are extremely representative of women who write away from their birth countries... Averis’ analysis is extremely comprehensive, clearly exposed and well supported with a solid and respected bibliography.’ — Verónica Añover, Modern and Contemporary France 23.3, 2015, 410-11
  • ‘This book draws a new and original path within the analysis of contemporary women’s exilic writing and the nomadic configuration of identity. Not only does it develop key notions of exile and women’s writing, applying them to illustrative cases, it also articulates connections that overturn preconceived arguments, such as the exilic stereotyped figures still in use in Euro-American theorizations, or the negative connotations of exile, which are replaced by the idea of exile as a productive and creative site in which more fluid identities are rebuilt.’ — Marianna Deganutti, OCCT Review online, October 2015

Bibliography entry:

Averis, Kate, Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women's Writing, Studies In Comparative Literature, 31 (Legenda, 2014)

First footnote reference: 35 Kate Averis, Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women's Writing, Studies In Comparative Literature, 31 (Legenda, 2014), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Averis, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Averis, Kate. 2014. Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women's Writing, Studies In Comparative Literature, 31 (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Averis 2014: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Averis 2014: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

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