Julia Kristeva

JK is one of the three French feminist theorists whose writings dominated the field of British and especially French and North American literary criticism and humanities scholarship during the 1980s and 1990s. Particularly influential have been her contributions to theories of the body and of the maternal, and to rendering current in academic discourse the terms intertextuality, semiotics, and abjection. Since the twentieth century most of her writing has taken the form of psychoanalytical studies of the human mind, always involving historical witness from literature and art. She has also written novels, some of them mysteries, and a series of biographies of women.