Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity

Helen Tookey presents a new study of Anais Nin (1903-77), focusing both onthe cultural and historical contexts in which her work was produced andreceived, and on the different versions of Nin herself - as a modernist, awoman writer, a public (and controversial) figure in the women's liberationmovement, and as a set of conflicting and often extreme representations offemininity. The author shows how contextual feminist approaches shed light onNin (who moved from Paris modernism of the 1930s to US second-wave feminism ofthe 1970s), and how this sheds light on key issues and conflicts within feministthinking since the 1970s, particularly questions of identity, femininity, andpsychoanalysis. iAnais Nin: Fictionality and Femininity/i provides new readingsof Nin through contemporary feminist approaches, using Nin to make anintervention into critical debates around modernism, feminism, andpsychoanalysis, writing and identity, fictionality and femininity.

Helen Tookey was born in Leicester in 1969. She studied philosophy at Sheffield and Cambridge, gaining a D.Phil from Oxford in 2000. She has taught at Liverpool University and Manchester Metropolitan University.