Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity

This text provides readings of Anais Nin through contemporary feminist approaches, using Nin to make an intervention into critical debates around modernism, feminism, psychoanalysis, writing, identity, fictionality and femininity.

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Helen Tookey presents a new study of Anaïs Nin (1903-77), focusing both on the cultural and historical contexts in which her work was produced and received, and on the different versions of Nin herself - as a modernist, a woman writer, a public (and controversial) figure in the women's liberation movement, and as a set of conflicting and often extreme representations of femininity. The author shows how contextual feminist approaches shed light on Nin (who moved from Paris modernism of the 1930s to US second-wave feminism of the 1970s), and how this sheds light on key issues and conflicts within feminist thinking since the 1970s, particularly questions of identity, femininity, and psychoanalysis. Anaïs Nin: Fictionality and Femininity provides new readings of Nin through contemporary feminist approaches, using Nin to make an intervention into critical debates around modernism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, writing and identity, fictionality and femininity.