Fairy tales promise teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Swedish primary school an engaging and supposedly simple way to teach both language and cultural content. By its very nature the genre is didactic; it depends on moral absolutism to address questions on how best to live and act in the world. When the content proposes how to live and act sustainably in the Anthropocene, however, a contrast emerges between the clear-cut morality of the fairy tale genre and the complexity of any proposed solutions. In this article we approach Winterson’s fairy tale Hansel and Greta from the perspectives of the three pillars of sustainability as defined by the United Nations, namely environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and social sustainability. We identify a set of productive entry points for Swedish teacher educators to begin from when seeking to develop grades 4–6 (ages 10–12) student teachers’ sustainability literacy and critical literacy, both skills that teachers arguably need to make appropriate selections among the many children’s books that address sustainability. These entry points illustrate instances in the text where tensions spring up between the solutions offered by Winterson’s fairy tale and the complex and often challenging problems that it addresses. 

A body of lifestyle and self-help publications with a French theme has captivated American audiences for decades. Sometimes referred to as the “Frenchwomen Know Best” genre, it portrays the Frenchwoman as a figure of refinement, elegance, and taste. In this paper, Debra Ollivier’s Entre Nous: A Woman’s Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl (2004) is presented as a key example of the genre. The guide offers its readers the promise of upward social mobility through a transformative process of self-fashioning, rooted in strict and continuous practices of self-governance and self-control, qualities that are portrayed as intrinsic to the ideal Frenchwoman. Social distinction, the guide promises, can be achieved through deliberate, aesthetically conscious consumption and personal refinement. Through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of self-governance and Slavoj Zizek’s critique of the neoliberal subject, this paper argues that the practices advocated in Ollivier’s guide align with and serve the interests of neoliberal capitalism. The self-governance promoted in Entre Nous operates through a set of competencies. Although these competencies are framed as tools for self-actualization, ultimately, they are designed to integrate consumers into a system of regulated individualism that benefits the neoliberal order. 

The chapter focuses on the construction of a neoliberal subject in a lifestyle guide that presents Frenchwomen as a feminine ideal. Publications in the genre that Vanity Fair calls the “Frenchwomen Know Best” have regularly appeared on the book market. These include Debra Ollivier’s book, Entre Nous: A Woman’s Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl (2003), in which the French girl is a locus of desire for social distinction realized through control over the self. Employing concepts of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Slavoj Žižek, the chapter argues that this control is self-imposed by a series of disciplinary practices, driven by the interests of neoliberal capitalism. Instead of working as a form of rationality, this type of self-governmentality is operating through various competencies, namely the personal, the affective, and the aesthetic. In this manner, neoliberal capitalism allows for flexible accumulation, which includes self-actualizing forms of action and consumption that are simultaneously moderated by a criticism of American over-consumerism. These competencies, and the criticism that they incorporate, are the very competencies that Ollivier assigns to the French girl. The purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate how the French girl does not destabilize capitalism, but rather, helps the system to incorporate some of the values in whose names it is criticized. 

To effectively utilize picturebooks as teaching resources for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the English language classroom, teachers must possess a set of interrelated competencies. Among these is the ability to analyse and evaluate the content of picturebooks to determine their suitability for ESD in English Language Teaching (ELT). This study presents a literature module that aimed to develop the ability of student teachers for the grade levels 1 to 3 (children in the age range seven to nine in Sweden) to combine ESD with ELT using picturebooks. The activities in the module were designed to achieve a progression from simple and concrete to complex and abstract forms of learning. The study outlines the module’s practical application in a teacher education English course at a Swedish university and evaluates the outcome by assessing lists of criteria that the student teachers created to help them determine the suitability of picturebooks in English for ESD. 

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a plethora of writers, who have challenged and expanded previous notions of feminist life writing. In Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity, Jennifer Cooke identifies works by thirteen contemporary writers as examples of what she refers to as a new audacity in life writing. Several of these writers are young, early in their careers, and already connected with each other through reviewers or publishers. Defining audacity as a ‘public challenge to conventions, characterized by a disregard for decorum, protocol, or moral restraints,’ Cooke refers to the thirteen writers as feminists, even when they do not directly engage with politics. Unlike their predecessors, she clarifies further, these writers are writing in the wake of queer, gender and trauma theory, and post-structural critiques of binary thinking. They view identity as social constructions manifested both materially and bodily. Through the perspectives that these writers offer on their lives and the experimental form their writing takes, Cooke argues, they are reshaping feminism and its concerns.

This book draws attention to the controversy that surrounds Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, and Simone de Beauvoir’s lives and the important role that their life stories have played in their feminist writing. Directly and indirectly, the four women have contributed to battles over feminism’s meaning through autobiographically informed political writing. Inevitably, therefore, their biographers are also participants in these battles, yet not always on the same side as their subjects. Writing Feminist Lives introduces a further fold of nuance into considerations of biography and feminism by showing that the biographers of the four women have made methodological choices that reflect their loyalty to, or their scepticism towards, competing ideological definitions of the exemplary feminist life. 

This chapter examines the portrayal of Ireland's mother-and-baby homes in the generally well-received film Philomena and the account on which the film is based, the British journalist Martin Sixsmith's portrayal of Philomena Lee's life and search for her son, who had been given up to an American couple for adoption under coercive circumstances. Enforced adoptions have long been a part of Irish life that was silenced within official discourse, just as the women themselves were silenced under a blanket of shame and denial within a form of patriarchal nationalism. Cultural representations such as film and trauma biography will of course tend towards certain structures of storytelling that reveal in dramatic form the deep emotional wounds inflicted on the survivors, yet are often challenged by an official discourse as shallow and untrustworthy. This controversy draws attention to other conflicts and paradoxes that can operate when there are attempts to give a voice to the silenced or marginalized, yet such efforts have begun a process of forcing a re-evaluation of Ireland's narratives of nationhood through the twentieth century