This fascinating study explores the pleasures and torments of love and sexuality as depicted in the works of six important French women writers: Rachilde, Colette, Leduc, Wittig, Cixous and Duras. Historically, erotic literature has been dominated by male writers. Feminist critics have argued that its central motifs of voyeurism, sadomasochism, incest and violence to women's bodies are governed by the unconscious fantasies and prejudices of a patriarchal sociocultural order.

The contributors question how this sociocultural order has affected the erotic writing of the women writers...

This book investigates the course of Anglo-French policy in Europe from 1936 to1938, a critical period during which France was governed by a series of Popular Front coalition Ministries. It asserts that French policy-makers made a substantial impact upon the course of British foreign policy whilst breathing new life into the waning Entente Cordiale. The study contends that close attention to the role of French influence is fundamental to a grasp of British appeasement and rearmament policy in the period and essential to the understanding of the Anglo-French response to such problems as the...

As France's oldest team sport, rugby football has throughout its 125-year history reflected major changes in French society. This book analyzes for the first time the complex variety of motives that have led the French to adopt and remake this rather unlikely British sport in their own image. A major site for the construction of masculine, class-based regional and national identities, France's tradition of 'Champagne rugby' continues to be as subject to dramatic upheavals as the society that produced it. The game's precocious professionalism and endemic violence have not infrequently...

This interdisciplinary book responds to the explosion of gay and lesbian creativity on modern-day France. Rather than attempting to formalize a specifically 'gay' or 'lesbian' style or identity, the authors seek to open up new 'homotextualities, ' understood here as ongoing constructions and deconstructions of both homosexuality and its environments. They investigate the work of (among others) Violette Leduc, Tony Duvert, Renaud Camus, and Guy Hocquenghem; the cinema of Josiane Balasko and Cyril Collard; the theoretical writings of Leo Bersani, Luce Irigaray, and Monique Wittig. Employing...

As a wave of open misogyny swept through French literature and society in the aftermath of the Great War, a new generation of professional women writers took up pen to redress the situation. They disputed the prescriptive social and cultural roles ascribed to women and proposed inspiring new definitions of womanhood. Many critics today are oblivious to women's literary achievements during this period, which remain subject to severe critical neglect. This book analyzes and challenges the way in which these important women writers have been marginalized in the annals of French literary...