Kirjahaku

The increase in the visibility of autobiographies and fiction recounting suffering in this century has gone hand-in-hand with a notable emphasis on the possibilities and limits of empathy. Contemporary French women's writing inscribes and interrogates the imperative to witness and respond to another subject's pain and raises questions about the relation between empathy and reading. Engaging with a range of recent texts, including work by Marie Darrieussecq, Am lie Nothomb, Camille Laurens, Delphine de Vigan and Christine Angot, and representations of different kinds of suffering (including eating disorders, the death of a child, and sexual abuse), this book engages productively with notions of empathy in relation to gender and alterity as well as with the question of what is at stake in reading narratives of someone else's pain.Kathryn Robson is Senior Lecturer in French at Newcastle University.

The increase in the visibility of autobiographies and fiction recounting suffering in this century has gone hand-in-hand with a notable emphasis on the possibilities and limits of empathy. Contemporary French women's writing inscribes and interrogates the imperative to witness and respond to another subject's pain and raises questions about the relation between empathy and reading. Engaging with a range of recent texts, including work by Marie Darrieussecq, Am lie Nothomb, Camille Laurens, Delphine de Vigan and Christine Angot, and representations of different kinds of suffering (including eating disorders, the death of a child, and sexual abuse), this book engages productively with notions of empathy in relation to gender and alterity as well as with the question of what is at stake in reading narratives of someone else's pain.Kathryn Robson is Senior Lecturer in French at Newcastle University.

Happiness (and the question of how to define, measure and facilitate it) has become a key theme in political, economic and social discourses in recent decades in France and elsewhere, yet research on happiness in French culture and film has been limited. Given that happiness is clearly gendered, this book looks critically at the ways in which contemporary French women’s writing and film give voice to and critique conceptions of happiness. Analysing French and francophone women’s writing (including Nina Bouraoui, Hélène Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Camille Laurens, Leïla Slimani, Delphine de Vigan) and film (including Claire Denis, Céline Sciamma and Agnès Varda), I focus on five main areas: images of happiness in consumer and Internet culture; happiness and intimacy in the family and the home; queering happiness; migrated happiness, and happiness and ageing. Whilst the ‘happiness turn’ is problematic, the desire for happiness, however fraught, matters and I show how representations of happiness in contemporary French women’s writing and film offer alternative conceptions of happiness that enable us to rethink happiness in more critical, diverse and inclusive terms.