This monograph explores the ways in which canonical Francophone Algerian authors writing in
the late-colonial period (1945-1962) namely Kateb Yacine Mohammed Dib Mouloud Feraoun
Mouloud Mammeri and Assia Djebar approached the representation of Algerian women through
literature. The book initially argues that a masculine domination of public fields of
representation in Algeria contributed to a postcolonial marginalization of women as public
agents. However it crucially also argues that the canonical writers of the period who were
mostly male both textually acknowledged their inability to articulate the experiences and
subjectivity of the feminine Other and deployed a remarkable variety of formal and conceptual
innovations in producing evocations of Algerian femininity that subvert the structural
imbalance of masculine symbolic hegemony. Though it does not shy from investigating those
aspects of its corpus that produce ideologically conditioned masculinist representations the
book chiefly seeks to articulate a shared reluctance concerning representativity a pessimism
regarding the revolution's capacity to deliver change for women and an omnipresent subversion
of masculine subjectivity in its canonical texts.
