This study investigates the place of sexuality in the writings of Andre Gide. Focusing on his writing of the 1920s and 1930s, the years in which Gide wrote most openly about his homosexuality, and also the years of his most notable left-wing political activity, the work interrogates both the political content of his reflections on his homosexuality and the ways in which his sexuality inflected his political interests.

In this provocative new book, Michael Lucey examines the unstable convergence of sexual, political, and literary commitments in Andre Gide's writing of the 1920s and 1930s--the years in which Gide wrote most openly about his homosexuality and participated most actively in left-wing politics. Through close readings of his memoirs, novels, and political tracts, Gide's Bent interrogates both the political content of Gide's ways of reflecting on his homosexuality and the ways his sexuality inflected his political interests.
One of the first modern writers to be "out," Gide used his...

In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honore de Balzac (1799 1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. The Misfit of the Family reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze as well as represent a range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends that in order to grasp the full complexity with which sexuality was understood by Balzac, it is necessary to appreciate how he...

In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters." The Misfit of the Family" reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze--as well as represent--a range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends that in order to grasp the full complexity with which sexuality was understood by Balzac, it is necessary to appreciate how he...

A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999, "Insult and the Making of the Gay Self "is an extraordinary set of reflections on "the gay question" by Didier Eribon, one of France's foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a pathbreaking biography of Michel Foucault, Eribon is a leading voice in French gay studies. In explorations of gay subjectivity as it is lived now and as it has been expressed in literary history and in the life and work of Foucault, Eribon argues that gay male politics, social life, and culture are transformative responses to an...

Never Say I reveals the centrality of representations of sexuality, and particularly same-sex sexual relations, to the evolution of literary prose forms in twentieth-century France. Rethinking the social and literary innovation of works by Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, and Colette, Michael Lucey considers these writers production of a first-person voice in which matters related to same-sex sexuality could be spoken of. He shows how their writings and careers took on political and social import in part through the contribution they made to the representation of social groups that were only...

"Never Say I" reveals the centrality of representations of sexuality, and particularly same-sex sexual relations, to the evolution of literary prose forms in twentieth-century France. Rethinking the social and literary innovation of works by Marcel Proust, AndrE Gide, and Colette, Michael Lucey considers these writers' production of a first-person voice in which matters related to same-sex sexuality could be spoken of. He shows how their writings and careers took on political and social import in part through the contribution they made to the representation of social groups that were only...

Therese and Isabelle is the tale of two boarding school girls in love. In 1966 when it was originally published in France, the text was censored because of its explicit depiction of young homosexuality. With this publication, the original, unexpurgated text--a stunning literary portrayal of female desire and sexuality--is available to a US audience for the first time. Included is an afterword by Michael Lucey, professor of French and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.