Jennifer Cooke, Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 234 pages, £83.99 (hardback)

Abstract

Jennifer Cooke’s monograph Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity is a recent addition to the Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture. The series offers a philosophically nuanced account of the twenty-first-century intellectual landscape, as Cooke’s book demonstrates. Aimed primarily at scholars and advanced readers, Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing consists of a carefully curated work of criticism of what Cooke calls ‘the new audacity’, a form of contemporary feminist life-writing that challenges autobiographical conventions. Cooke argues that ‘unlike their second-wave predecessors [new audacity writers] write in the wake of queer, gender, and trauma theory, post-structuralist and Derridean critiques of binary thinking’ (9). Building on a long history of women’s experimental life-writing scholarship, Cooke’s study examines these writers’ personal and theoretical relation to contemporary thought. In so doing, she points to the powerful presence of theory within contemporary feminist life-writing and the forms of fearlessness that its authors deploy.