Feminist theory on motherhood has successfully transformed mothers into subjects of their own discourse, recognized the historical, heterogeneous and socially constructed origins of their life experience while, at the same time, widening our understanding of the notion of mothering. This collection combines a literary and a wider cultural perspective from which to look at the topic of the representation of other or forgotten motherhoods. Mothers who have been forced to live exiled and away from their children, women who after trying to conceive, get pregnant but discover they cannot bear to become mothers, or even literary characters based on an autobiographical experience of a sexually abusive mother. The essays critically point out how writing becomes a tool to think and write about the many aspects of motherhood such as an idealized maternal experience versus the real one or the accepted stereotypes of the good mother and the bad mother.

It’s Silence, Soundly, It’s Nothing, Seriously and It’s Absence, Presently, continue The ‘It’ Series published by Matador since The Book of It (2010). They constitute another stage in an artistic journey exploring the visual and audial dialectic of mark, word and image that began over 25 years ago. In their aesthetic form the books are a decentred trilogy united together in a new concept of The Bibliograph. All three present this new aesthetic object, which transcends the narrow limits of the academic bibliography. The alphabetical works also share a tripartite structure and identical length. The Bibliograph itself is characterised by its strategic place within each book as a whole as well as by the complex variations in meaning of the dominant motifs – nothing/ness, absence and silence – which recur throughout the alphabetical entries that constitute the elements of each text. It’s Nothing, Seriously, for example, addresses the amusing paradox that so much continues to be written today about – nothing! The aleatory character of the entries in the texts encourage the modern reader to reflect on each theme and to read them in a new way. The reader is invited as well to examine their various inter-textual relations across given conventional boundaries in the arts and sciences at several levels of physical, psychical & social reproduction.

Muslim women have been stereotyped by Western academia as oppressed and voiceless. This volume problematizes this Western academic representation. Muslim Women Writers from the Middle East from Out al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah (1899–1968) and Latifa al-Zayat (1923–1996) from Egypt, to current diasporic writers such as Tamara Chalabi from Iraq, Mohja Kahf from Syria, and even trendy writers such as Alexandra Chreiteh, challenge the received notion of Middle Eastern women as subjugated and secluded. The younger largely Muslim women scholars collected in this book present cutting edge theoretical perspectives on these Muslim women writers. This book includes essays from the conflict-ridden countries such as Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and the resultant diaspora. The strengths of Muslim women writers are captured by the scholars included herein. The approach is feminist, post-colonial, and disruptive of Western stereotypical academic tropes.

This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relationship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generically hybrid or "liminal" narratives dealing with individual and collective traumas, running the spectrum from the testimonial novel and the fictional autobiography to the fake memoir, written by a variety of famous, more neglected contemporary British, Irish, US, Canadian, and German writers. Building on the psychological insights and theorizing of the fathers of trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma critics and theorists, the articles examine the narrative strategies, structural experimentations and hybridizations of forms, paying special attention to the way in which the texts fight the unrepresentability of trauma by performing rather than representing it. The ethicality or unethicality involved in this endeavor is assessed from the combined perspectives of the non-foundational, non-cognitive, discursive ethics of alterity inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, and the ethics of vulnerability. This approach makes Contemporary Trauma Narratives an excellent resource for scholars of contemporary literature, trauma studies and literary theory.

Tunisian women's literary production in French, published or set between the years 1987 and 2011 from Tunisia's second president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's rise to power to the eve of the Tunisian Revolution reveals the role of women, their political engagement, and their resistance to patriarchal oppression. A great deal of media and scholarly attention has focused on the role of women during the Tunisian Revolution itself, yet few studies have considered women's literary and active engagement prior to the uprising. By contrast, this book focuses specifically on the time period leading to the Revolution. The book is structured around three chapters, each focusing on a different form of writing and on a number of contemporary Tunisian writers who have chosen to express themselves in French. Sonia Alba explores the complex ways in which the authors have attempted to deal with those issues cultural, social and political most relevant to them. This is the first study of Tunisian women's writing in French to compare and contrast key themes in three different genres within a single study and within the conceptual framework of subaltern counterpublics. The work is enhanced by the inclusion of extracts from previously unpublished authors interviews. Tunisian Women's Writing in French is essential reading for all Francophone and Postcolonial scholars, and for scholars and students working in Contemporary Women's Writing.

Examining the centrality of the city in Canadian literary production post-1960, this collection of critical essays presents an interdisciplinary representation of the urban from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. By analysing contemporary Canadian literature (in English), the contributors intend to produce not only an alternative picture of the national literary traditions but also fresh articulations of the relationship between (Canadian) identity, citizenship, and nation. Since the 1960s, metropolitan regions across the world have experienced radical transformation. For critical urban studies scholars, this phenomenon has been described as a ‘restructuring’. This study argues that in Canada this ‘restructuring’ has been accompanied by a literary rearrangement of its canon, consisting of a gradual shift of focus from the wild or rural to the urban. Alluding to the changes within contemporary Canadian cities, the term ‘postmetropolis’ locates the contributors’ shared theoretical framework within a critical postmodern paradigm. Centered on a particular selection of poetic or fictional texts, each essay pushes the theoretical framework further, suggesting the need for new tools of interpretation and analysis. This book presents an urban literary portrait of Canada that is both thematically and conceptually coherent. Using a range of interdisciplinary methodologies, it adeptly navigates a range of urban issues such as surveillance, asylum, diaspora, mobility, the queer, and the post-political. This book will be of interest to those studying or working on Canadian literature, both in Canada and internationally, as well as to those scholars engaged in investigations that intersect literature and urban studies.

This book offers the analysis of a selection of North American texts that dismantle and resist normative frames through the resignification of concepts such as unhappiness, precarity, failure, and vulnerability. The chapters bring to the fore how those potentially negative elements can be refigured as ambivalent sites of resistance and social bonding. Following Sara Ahmed’s rereading of happiness, other authors such as Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Jack Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, or Henry Giroux are mobilized to interrogate films, memoirs, and novels that deal with precarity, alienation, and inequality. The monograph contributes to enlarging the archives of unhappiness by changing the focus from prescribed norms and happy endings to unruly practices and unhappy beginnings. As the different contributors show, unhappiness, precarity, vulnerability, or failure can be harnessed to illuminate ways of navigating the world and framing society that do not necessarily conform to the script of happiness—whatever that means.