This book provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date critical introduction to the writings of Helene Cixous (1937-), focusing on key motifs, such as dreams, the supernatural, literature, psychoanalysis, creative writing, realism, sexual differences, laughter, secrets, the 'Mother unconscious', drawing, painting, life writing, telephones, non-human animals, telepathy and the 'art of cutting'. There are close readings of Shakespeare, Bronte, Shelley, Poe, Carroll, Freud, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett and Derrida, for example, alongside in-depth explorations of her own writings, from Inside (1969) and 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (1975) up to the present. Royle's book will be useful to students and academics coming to Cixous's work for the first time, but it will also appeal to readers interested in contemporary literature, creative writing, life writing, narrative theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, feminism, queer theory, ecology, drawing and painting.

About the Author
Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex

Reviews

'Royle considers Cixous's work in relation to that of authors that she has herself read and analyzed, in particular Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida. The author states that his study is intended to be accessible for readers with little background in feminist literary theory, deconstruction, or psychoanalysis, and he delivers on that promise. This study is an exercise in creative reading, an approach Royle defines in the introduction for those unfamiliar with it... The book is compelling and will interest readers of Cixous in any language.'
Reprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association.

'This book offers a source of delectation and insight to readers of Helene Cixous's writing. It is delightful in numerous respects. Charmingly ludic, it veers playfully - in a manner theorized by its author a decade earlier as characteristic of literature itself - not only between Cixous's texts and between her texts and those of a host of other writers as disparate as Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, and Agatha Christie, but, in addition, between the four words of the subtitle: dreamer, realist, analyst, writing.'
French Studies

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Book Information
ISBN 9781526160454
Author Nicholas Royle
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Manchester University Press
Publisher Manchester University Press
Weight(grams) 376g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 14mm