Beyond the Happy Ending - (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures) by Kathryn Robson (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Happiness (and the question of how to define, measure and facilitate it) has become a key theme in political, economic and social discourses in recent decades in France and elsewhere, yet research on happiness in French culture and film has been limited. Given that happiness is clearly gendered, this book looks critically at the ways in which contemporary French women's writing and film give voice to and critique conceptions of happiness. Analysing French and francophone women's writing (including Nina Bouraoui, Hélène Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Camille Laurens, Leïla Slimani, Delphine de Vigan) and film (including Claire Denis, Céline Sciamma and Agnès Varda), I focus on five main areas: images of happiness in consumer and Internet culture; happiness and intimacy in the family and the home; queering happiness; migrated happiness, and happiness and ageing. Whilst the 'happiness turn' is problematic, the desire for happiness, however fraught, matters and I show how representations of happiness in contemporary French women's writing and film offer alternative conceptions of happiness that enable us to rethink happiness in more critical, diverse and inclusive terms.

Review Quotes

"Beyond the Happy Ending is an excellent addition to the field of French Studies and to analyses of women's work more generally (both literary and cinematic)." Dr Sandra Daroczi, University of Bath

"This book is, to the best of my knowledge, original in focusing on the representation in women-authored texts of happiness. It brings to bear on a corpus of contemporary women-authored literary and filmic texts a useful - and in some cases relatively little known - body of theory on happiness, as social imperative transmitted notably through advertising and media in general, and as literary/cinematic theme. This approach has not previously been adopted in relation to French/francophone culture, and it proves illuminating." Professor Diana Holmes, University of Leeds