Colette

by Dana Strand

This book by Dana Strand is the first full-length study of Colette's short fiction. Strand offers an engaging introduction to colorful details of Colette's life, including her childhood amidst the pastoral beauty of rural France, her evolving relation to her mother, her romantic entanglements with both men and women, her career as a music-hall performer, her first successes and enduring celebrity as an author. Nevertheless, Strand resists the temptation to view Colette's work as strictly confessional. Instead, she situates Colette's short fiction within feminist debate of the past two decades on "women's writing," while also considering more recent theoretical advances that problematize the idea of gender as a stable category or discursive position. Colette's stories, she argues, occupy a "no man's land," an uncharted boundary region where culturally sanctioned definitions of gender, morality, and the genre of the short story are called into question. . This volume makes readily availa