Literature can have a disturbing effect on its readers. It unsettles our hold on everyday experience and makes us strangers and exiles. Anna Smith argues that this is the side of literature which attracts critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva.

Kristeva is drawn to states of extremity where language and the psyche are under duress, and in this book Smith examines the way the alchemical properties of words may transform these extremities into what Kristeva calls 'a fire of tongues, an exit from representation'.

If Kristeva belongs to postmodernity, she is also interested in asking what renews the system? If we are exiled within language, where can genuine innovation originate, and does it make a difference when a woman asks these questions? Smith takes up Kristeva's concerns through the figure of the female voyager and studies moments in a number of her texts where exile and dissolution of being appear to be countered by an investment in a privileged feminine space.

Preserving a space within the psyche that resists death and renews speech, Smith argues, is the only kind of salvation Kristeva believes is available to us today.