The Rock and The Kangaroos

This reader presents the work of leading French women philosophers to an English-speaking audience. Howells draws on several major areas of philosophical and theoretical debate including ethics, psychoanalysis, law, politics, history, science and rationality. The philosophers include some names already well-known in Britain and the US such as Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous and Kofman, but also many others celebrated in France but whose innovative work has not yet achieved such widespread recognition in the English-speaking world such as Sylviane Agacinski, Nicole Loraux, Monique David-Menard, Francoise Collin, Genevieve Fraisse, and Blandine Kriegel. Most of the essays in the collection have been specially translated for the reader, and in several cases this is the first time any of the philosopher's work has appeared in English. The project is necessarily feminist in inspiration but takes an important step forwards in not taking the feminist struggle itself as its focus but rather engaging with influential French women philosophers on the questions they themselves choose to foreground.