834 Reviews extensive analysis ofthe links between Bicentenaire Kit and Butor's other 'American' texts or between the Liechtenstein postcards and 6 810 000 litres d'eau par seconde, Description de San Marco, or Intervalle would undoubtedly have yielded illuminating results. Furthermore, although the link which Miller establishes between Bicentenaire Kit and home assembly kits is convincing, she does not address the issue ofthe work's artistic ancestry (e.g. Duchamp's Boite verte). Finally, the occasional authorial asides fitsomewhat uncomfortably within an academic study, though the enthusiasm they convey, combined with the generous illustration and translations, may well help to bring these works to the attention of non-specialist readers; it is certainly to be hoped that Miller's concluding plea forfurtherresearch will be heard by Butor specialists, as well as by supervisors and prospective doctoral students. Prisms and Rainbows offers sensitive, well-informed, and sympathetic readings of several challenging and multifaceted works and well prepares the ground for furtherexploration of this rich field. University of Edinburgh Jean H. Duffy Nouvelles ecrivaines: nouvelles voix? Ed. by Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers. (Faux Titre, 230) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2002. 331 pp. ?65. ISBN 90-420-1043-6. This collection makes a rich and substantial contribution to the growing body of criticism preoccupied with the emergence in the 1990s of a new generation of women writers writing in French, and like Gill Rye and Michael Worton's 2002 collection of essays, Women's Writing in Contemporary France (see MLR, 99 (2004), 106061 ), provides ample evidence to support the contention that a thriving new wave of women writers has and continues to make a sizeable contribution to the contemporary French literaryscene. Each of its fifteenchapters is dedicated to the work of a different woman writer.These include some, such as Christine Angot, Louise Lambrichs, and Amelie Nothomb, whose work will be familiar to readers and scholars ofcontemporary French literature, as well as others with whose work they may be less familiar, such as Genevieve Brisac and Linda Le. The collection opens with an insightful and very useful introduction of more than forty pages in which Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers examine the public reception in France of works by women and the many common textual preoccupations which unite an otherwise diverse group of writers. For Morello and Rodgers, the under-representation of women in the fields of publishing and academia, as well as a media-driven preoccupation with persona? lity rather than literary merit, has significantly contributed to the continuing poor visibility of women writers in France and a consistent failure to acknowledge their contribution to the contemporary French novel. In an attempt to address this apparent marginalization, Morello and Rodgers devote the second half oftheir introduction to a valuable discussion ofthe work of featured authors not only in the light of the thematic and formal features of ecriturefeminine but also from the perspective of numerous trends discernible within the contemporary French novel. The co-editors observe that, while female-authored texts of the 1990s share many points of contact with the work of previous generations of French women writers, the irony,intertextuality, and authorial aggression that mark contemporary French literary productions also characterize the work of many ecrivaines actuelles. Further, several contributions bear out the co-editors' observation that many recent textes de femmes display an ambivalence towards established feminist precepts. In their introduction Morello and Rodgers write: 'il semblerait que certaines ecrivaines des annees 1990 se sentent capables d'aller plus loin: de se concevoir implicitementfeministes tout en produisant des textes qu'il est difficiled'apprehender comme favorables a des pensees feministes' MLR, 100.3, 2005 835 (p. 45). Examples include Catherine Rodgers's searching discussion of the conflicting feminist interpretations invited by the many evocations of extreme states of being contained in early texts by Marie Darrieussecq. Shirley Jordan's exploration of the transgressive and often violent fictions of Virginie Despentes is marked by a similar interest in the feminist implications of female-authored textual productions. Despite the absence of an index, the collection is presented with a good deal of clarity.A short chapter summary?provided both in French and in English?appears at the head...