Exploring the poetic fictions of prominent French, feminist writer Hélène Cixous, this open access book highlights rich and timely ideas of selfhood in her work. With careful elaboration of the writer’s relationship with Algeria, Birgit M. Kaiser shows how Cixous reflects on experiences of colonial and patriarchal othering. More than that, she crafts a voice – an autofictive "I" – that takes the figure of Echo as a guiding mythology to portray selfhood as diffractive, always already exceeding binary models of self/other that remain central to conceptions of subjectivity. Putting forward the notion of ‘echology’, Kaiser examines how Cixous performs selfhood within ecologies of cohabitation, thereby critiquing and revising key tenets of psychoanalysis and its narrative of the subject. Drawing from famous texts such as The Laugh of the Medusa , The Newly Born Woman , and The Portrait of Dora , but also more recent titles like Osnabrück , So Close , Death Shall be Dethroned or Cixous's collaborations with Adel Abdessemed, Hélène Cixous's Poetics of Voice: Echo - Subjectivity - Diffraction offers fresh variations on familiar psychoanalytic and semiotic axes, and new ventures into dialogue with feminist new materialisms. Elegant, politically dynamic and providing exciting news ways into Cixous’s work and poetics, the concept of ‘echology’ lends new perspectives for feminist and postcolonial formations of selfhood and new imaginations of what it means to be human within planetary life. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Utrecht University. “The book that Anglophone audiences have been waiting for, Hélène Cixous's Poetics of Voice develops a meticulous and elegant 'echology' that offers acute insight into Cixous's extensive oeuvre. Sallying back and forth across her work, Kaiser details precise connections with a wider field of international scholarship. Savour it.” ― Lynn Turner, Reader in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK Birgit M. Kaiser is Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has been a visiting researcher in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Paris-Nanterre (April/May 2017) and in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University, USA. She is co-editor - with Lorna Burns - of Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze (2012) and editor of Singularity and Transnational Poetics (2015) and is author of Figures of Simplicity (2011) and - with Kathrin Thiele - Diffracted Worlds - Diffractive Readings (2018). Marie Mulvey-Roberts is Professor of English Literature at the University of the West of England, UK. She is the author of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (MUP, 2016), winner of the Alan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize. She has authored, edited and co-edited over 30 books. This will be her third edited book on Angela Carter. Recently she made a film on Carter's The Bloody Chamber for Massolit, for use in schools (33,000 downloads). She was the co-curator of the Strange Worlds exhibition on Angela Carter at the Royal West Academy of Art in Bristol 2017 and co-edited the catalogue. She is the co-founder of Women's Writing , for which she serves as Editor and runs two Carter websites with Charlotte Crofts. Jennifer Gustar is an Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Canada. She is an Associate Member of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Her research currently focusses on contemporary women writers, with special interest in writers of diaspora. She is North American reviews editor for Contemporary Women Writers and has published on a range of women fiction writers such as Anita Rau Badami, Bernardine Evaristo, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith, and Elizabeth Knox.