This book provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date critical introduction to the writings of Helene Cixous (1937-), focusing on key motifs, such as dreams, the supernatural, literature, psychoanalysis, creative writing, realism, sexual differences, laughter, secrets, the Mother unconscious, drawing, painting, life writing, telephones, non-human animals, telepathy and the art of cutting. There are close readings of Shakespeare, Bronte, Shelley, Poe, Carroll, Freud, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett and Derrida, for example, alongside in-depth explorations of her own writings, from Inside (1969) and The Laugh of the Medusa (1975) up to the present. Royles book will be useful to students and academics coming to Cixouss work for the first time, but it will also appeal to readers interested in contemporary literature, creative writing, life writing, narrative theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, feminism, queer theory, ecology, drawing and painting.