For more than fifty years, Assia Djebar, Silver Chair of French at New York University and winner of the Neustadt Prize for Contribution to World Literature, has used the tools of poetry, fiction, drama and film to vividly portray the world of Muslim women in all its complexity. In the process, she has become one of the most important figures in North African literature. In Assia Djebar, Jane Hiddleston traces Djebar’s development as a writer against the backdrop of North Africa’s tumultuous history. Whereas Djebar’s early writings were largely an attempt to delineate clearly the experience of being a woman, an intellectual, and an Algerian embedded in that often violent history, she has in her more recent work evinced a growing sense that the influence of French culture on Algerian letters may make such a project impossible. The first book-length study of this significant writer, Assia Djebar will be of tremendous interest to anyone studying post-colonial literature, women’s studies or Francophone culture.

Jane Hiddleston's broading-ranging, thoughtful monograph on the literary work (not the films) of Assia Djebar is a welcome addition to scholarship on a still under-discussed author. Performing an original and productive cross-fertilization between postcolonial (and, on occasion, Islamic) thought, and French theories of subjectivity, Hiddleston comprehensively treats the formidable body of Djebar's work...very important contribution to scholarship on Francophone literature.

Source: Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 5.2

Outstanding accomplishment ... [an] invaluable work.

Mary Jean Green Source: South Central Review, Vol. 25.3

The excellence of Hiddleston's research and writing bears testimony to a fine intelligence that promises an answer to come.

Source: International Journal of Francophone Studies, Volume 11, Numbers 1 & 2