Experiment and Experience is a collection of critical essays on twenty-first-century women-authored literature in France. In particular, the volume focuses on how contemporary women's writing engages creatively with socio-political issues and real-life experiences. Authors covered include well-established names, the 'new generation' of writers who first came to the fore of the French literary scene in the 1990s and whose work has now matured into an important oeuvre, as well as new emerging writers of the 2000s, whose work is already attracting scholarly and critical attention. Within the overarching theme of 'experiment and experience', the contributors explore a range of issues: identities, family relations, violence, borders and limits, and the environment. They consider fiction, autobiography, writing for the theatre, autofiction and other hybrid genres and forms. Their analyses highlight difficult issues, refreshing perspectives and exciting new themes at the start of the new millennium and moving forward into the coming decades.

Contents: Amaleena Damlé: The Mutant Metamorphic Subject: Femininity and Embodiment in Virginie Despentes's King Kong théorie - Jeri English: Writing the Self, Writing the Other: New Reflections of Beauvoir in Camille Laurens's Dans ces bras-là - Ania Wroblewski: Rewriting the Feminine: Sophie Calle and Annie Ernaux Experience and Exploit the Absolute Crime - Siobhán McIlvanney: Fighting for Independence: Leïla Marouane's La Jeune Fille et la mère and Maïssa Bey's Cette fille-là - Julie Rodgers: Rewriting the Mother-Daughter Plot: Fête des mères by Florence Emptaz - Jean Anderson: No Second Chances? Grandmothering and Storytelling in the Work of Dominique Mainard - Gill Rye: Marginal Identities and New Kinship Paradigms: Surrogate Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Writing in France - Alexandra Kurmann: Foreclosed Fatherhood: A Decade of Psychoanalytical Experimentation in Linda Lê's Fiction - Margaret E. Gray: The Cook, Her Narrative, Its Recipes and the Textual Body in Calixthe Beyala's Comment cuisiner son mari à l'africaine - Lucile Desblache: Women and Apes in Twenty-First-Century French Writing: New Narratives of Experience - Mary Noonan: Un corps vivant de symbôles: Noëlle Renaude's Staging of the Writing Self - Marie-Claire Barnet: Off Limits: Trans-Border Land and Language in Marie Darrieussecq.