Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins

In this first critical study in English to focus exclusively on Annie Ernaux's writing trajectory, Siobhan McIlvanney provides a stimulating and challenging analysis of Ernaux's individual texts. Following a broadly feminist hermeneutics, this study engages in a series of provocative close readings of Ernaux's works in a move to highlight the contradictions and nuances in her writing, and to demonstrate the intellectual intricacies of her literary project. By so doing, it seeks to introduce new readers to Ernaux's works, while engaging those already familiar with her writing on less familiar terrain.

Ernaux's writing is informed by a variety of contemporary concerns, including the categorisation of genre and its particularly fluid manifestations in the realm of autobiography; the subject position articulated by minority groups and the role played by language in identity formation; the naturalisation and consequent deconstruction of class and gender ideologies. By focusing on the textual manifestations of these concerns, and providing both a general overview of Ernaux's work and an analysis of each text's specific thematic and narrative emphases, Annie Ernaux. The Return to Origins is essential reading for those interested in French literature, and literary and cultural studies generally.