This collection of 12 essays offers detailed and varied studies of the unique problematic
construction of contemporary identities from a literary and cultural perspective. The Painful
Chrysalis covers transcendental relevant and polemic topics like the difficulty of growing up
classist and interracial struggles narratives of displacement and exile queering the world
power politics and the individual troubling poetics of the self politically contesting
documentaries or boredom and male anorexia. It ranges from British authors of very different
origin (such as David Lodge Radclyffe Hall Paul Golding Zadie Smith or Abdulrazak Gurnah) to
Canadian and American women writers (such as P.K. Page Lalitha Gandbhir Anita Rau Badami
Chitra Bannerji Divakaruni Denise Levertov Audre Lorde Linda Hogan Janice Mirikitani or
Gloria AnzaldGloria Anzaldúa). The heterodoxy in the critical approaches together with the
diversity of the contents offered serve to trace an ample mosaic of the urges and drives of
artists living in modern multicultural societies and suffering from specific traumatic
experiences. Ultimately their disturbances and fractures help us elucidate the way in which
human fragility is transformed into cathartic creativity.
