Overview
- Presents a comparative study of the lives and works of three women of the French resistance who played major roles during World War II.
- Explores the ways in which literary texts and history interconnect with regard to women’s writings.
- Contributes to various forms of scholarship, crossing several disciplines.
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book presents the first comparative study of the works of Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion in relation to their vigorous struggles against Nazi aggression during World War II and the Holocaust. It illuminates ways in which their early lives conditioned both their political engagements during wartime and their extraordinary literary creations empowered by what Lara R. Curtis refers to as modes of ‘writing resistance.’ With skillful recourse to a remarkable variety of genres, they offer compelling autobiographical reflections, vivid chronicles of wartime atrocities, eyewitness accounts of victims, and acute perspectives on the political implications of major events. Their sensitive reflections of gendered subjectivity authenticate the myriad voices and visions they capture. In sum, this book highlights the lives and works of three courageous women who were ceaselessly committed to a noble cause during the Holocaust and World War II.
Reviews
“As ground-breaking as it is masterfully executed, Lara Curtis’s Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender deftly brings to light the lives and works of three women, all exemplary figures in the French Resistance during World War II, two of whom (Delbo and Tillion) were interned in two of the deadliest concentration camps, Auschwitz and Ravensbrueck, exploring how these women “wrote resistance” duringtheir time in the camps and how these works were shaped, in turn, by their experiences as women. While none of these three women were Jewish, their portrayals of fellow-internees and members of the resistance who were Jews add a completely new and until now under-studied dimension to Holocaust literature. Curtis’s work on Noor Inayat Khan, in particular, is absolutely original and will be regarded as a crucially significant contribution to Francophone resistance literature.” (James E. Young, author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, The Texture of Memory, and The Stages of Memory)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Lara R. Curtis is a founder of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. She is currently a Five College Associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender
Book Subtitle: Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion
Authors: Lara R. Curtis
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31242-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-31241-1Published: 07 November 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-31244-2Published: 07 November 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-31242-8Published: 28 October 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 159
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations
Topics: Jewish Cultural Studies, History of World War II and the Holocaust, Women's Studies, Culture and Gender, Phenomenology, Twentieth-Century Literature