In this full-length study of Helene Cixous, the first to be published in English, Verena Andermatt Conley adopts a chronological and expository approach, bravely taking on the daunting task of presenting to non-French-speaking readers an author who specializes in word-play. "Whether you have or have not attempted to read Cixous, I highly recommend this helpful, and sometimes brilliant, companion to her writing."--Romanic Review "A valuable exposition of Cixous's projects, showing their changing relation to the cultural and historical situation from which she writes."--Year's Work in English Studies. "[This book] serves the useful purpose--for English readers--of setting out the detailed trajectory of Cixous's writing career, describing her texts (both 'fiction' and 'theory') without any attempt at crude paraphrase, and placing her ideas in a wider ...context."--Christopher Norris, London Review of Books. Born in Algeria in 1937, Helene Cixous achieved world fame for her short stories, criticism, and fictionalized autobiography (Dedans, 1969). Her work quickly became controversial because it frankly tested a distinction between male and female writing.Her literary experiments and her conclusions make her one of the most stimulating and most elusive feminist theorists of our time. Verena Andermatt Conley, a professor of French and women's studies at Miami University, has written the first full-length study of Cixous in English. Looking at Cixous as writer, teacher, and theoretician, Conley takes up Cixous's ongoing exploration of the "feminine" as related to the "masculine"--words not to be equated with "woman" and "man"--and her search for a terminology less freighted with emotion and prejudgment. Conley has updated this paperback edition with a new preface, bibliography, and interview with Cixous conducted by the editors of Hors Cadre.