Colette

the long version

This book by Dana Strand is the first full-length study of Colette's short fiction. Strand offers an engaging introduction to colorful details of Colette's life, including her childhood amidst the pastoral beauty of rural France, her evolving relation to her mother, her romantic entanglements with both men and women, her career as a music-hall performer, her first successes and enduring celebrity as an author. Nevertheless, Strand resists the temptation to view Colette's work as strictly confessional. Instead, she situates Colette's short fiction within feminist debate of the past two decades on "women's writing," while also considering more recent theoretical advances that problematize the idea of gender as a stable category or discursive position. Colette's stories, she argues, occupy a "no man's land," an uncharted boundary region where culturally sanctioned definitions of gender, morality, and the genre of the short story are called into question. . This volume makes readily available a range of original and exciting material on an author whose central importance to the twentieth-century French literary canon is now affirmed. For students and teachers of French literature, the short story, literary feminism, gender and queer theory, this articulate, comprehensive and insightful study is a welcome introduction to the voice of a writer who seems ever our contemporary.