Another Colette

Despite the reading public's ready embrace of French writer Colette (1873-1954) as author and public figure, her work has sometimes been dismissed as trivial or feminine and as largely unassimilable to the major trends that mark twentieth-century French literary studies. This study critically rereads the author's oeuvre to reveal another Colette - one who employed specific narrative strategies to construct a gendered textual subject separate from herself - and highlights. The contradictions that arise from that construction. Another Colette offers a revisionary reading of Colette in light of poststructuralist and feminist criticism, particularly that of Derrida, Lacan, and Kristeva, and makes a significant contribution to current questions regarding the relationship of gender, sexuality, and language. In moving beyond the traditional gesture of reading the work of a woman writer as no more than her own experience, the study argues for a. View of language that expands the possibilities of rereading. This analysis of Colette as text thus questions previous conceptions of reading "woman"; in reading Colette as more than Colette, the book opens up a range of future possibilities of reading as. Another Colette will interest scholars and students of Colette and of twentieth-century French literature. It will also appeal to feminist scholars and those working on theoretical questions regarding gender, Sexuality, and language.