French Literature Reviews - 2026
É. Ledoux-Beaugrand, Imaginaires de la filiation. Héritage et mélancolie dans la littérature contemporaine des femmes
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
Évelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand, Imaginaires de la filiation. Héritage et mélancolie dans la littérature contemporaine des femmes
Montreal: Éditions XYZ, coll. “Théorie et Littérature”, 2013
320 p.
EAN: 9782892618044
Price: 29.95 CAD
Publisher's overview:
This essay explores the legacies of feminism in contemporary women's literature. Évelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand examines the shift that occurred around 1990 in how female authors conceive and imagine filiation. In the literary works of the two preceding decades, authors sought to break away from patriarchal society, focusing primarily on sisterhood and horizontal relationships. In contrast, their successors have turned to the vertical axis of genealogy, exploring their relationships with fathers, mothers, children, and even distant ancestors. Analyzing both the ruptures and continuities between these two generations, the essay is grounded in a reflection on melancholia as a creative stance. Its rich corpus encompasses French and Quebec narratives and novels, alongside feminist writings from diverse backgrounds, with a primary focus on Quebec, France, and the United States.
Évelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand holds a Ph.D. in French-language Literatures from the Université de Montréal. Her research interests include feminist theories and discourses, psychoanalysis, and the representation of history and traumatic memory in literature. She currently lives in Belgium, where she is conducting postdoctoral research on the memory of the Holocaust in French and Francophone literature since 1980.
The study of filiation in literature often intersects with psychoanalytic inquiries into how subjects construct their identity through ancestral ties. Imaginaires de la filiation. Héritage et mélancolie dans la littérature contemporaine des femmes examines the shift around 1990 in how female authors conceive filiation, moving from a focus on sisterhood and horizontal relationships toward the vertical axis of genealogy, including relationships with fathers, mothers, and ancestors. The work explores the tension between past models and present narratives, using melancholia as a framework for understanding these creative stances.
The analysis situates these literary developments within a transnational framework, drawing on a corpus that includes French, Quebec, and American authors. This approach reflects a wider scholarly interest in how gendered perspectives on history and memory shape narrative structures. By focusing on the interplay between rupture and continuity, the text examines the ways in which writers negotiate their relationship to maternal and paternal legacies. Readers interested in the evolution of feminist literary discourse and the intersection of psychoanalysis with contemporary narrative forms may find this study relevant.