The first four decades of the twentieth century saw male homosexuality appear in French literature with increasing frequency and boldness. Departing from earlier, more muted presentations, Andr Gide, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, Ren Crevel, Francis Carco, and a host of less-famous writers, all created overtly gay characters are gave them increasingly numerous and significant roles. Far from being simply shunned or marginalized, a number of these works were instead accepted as canonical. Lawrence Schehr's French Gay Modernism is the only study devoted to the analyzing these representations of...

A gold mine of information about a hidden queer culture

Thirty-two years before Simone de Beauvoir's classic "The ""Second Sex, " popular French novelist Willy published "The ""Third Sex, " a vivid description of the world of European homosexuals in France, Italy, and Germany during the late 1920s. Stepping directly into the heart of gay men's culture, Willy follows homosexual nightlife into music halls, nightclubs, casinos, bars, and saunas. While he finds plenty of drug and alcohol abuse, he also discovers homosexual publishers, scientific societies, group rivalries, and opinions--both...

This work offers a smorgasbord of topics on cuisine in modern France, from the invention of French cuisine in the early 1800s to the McDonaldization of that national emblem, the French fry. The editors uses discrete moments in French history to illuminate the intersection of food, nationality, and culture: the origin of modern French gastronomy, the role of food in literature and films from Proust and Colette to detective fiction, public and private meals at the end of the 19th century, and the fusion of international cuisines at the turn of this century.

This work offers a smorgasbord of topics on cuisine in modern France, from the invention of French cuisine in the early 1800s to the McDonaldization of that national emblem, the French fry. The editors uses discrete moments in French history to illuminate the intersection of food, nationality, and culture: the origin of modern French gastronomy, the role of food in literature and films from Proust and Colette to detective fiction, public and private meals at the end of the 19th century, and the fusion of international cuisines at the turn of this century.

This work aims to bring the insights of American gender studies to modern French literature. It focuses on the complex relations between narrative, theory, interpretation and homosexuality in the work of Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, Michel Tournier and Renaud Camus. Specifically, the author shows how, in their work, these authors use homosexuality and its inscriptions as a means of interpretation and develop a homosexual hermeneutics that provides understanding, models of interpretation, and a gearing of the readers expectations. Each of the authors uses homosexuality to question inherited...

Focusing on works by Rene Crevel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, and Herve Guibert, this text studies how homosexuality functions at the limits of narrative, as part of the deep structure of narrative, and at the border between public and private discourse. It examines each writer in turn, reflecting on how their texts represent homosexuality, both implicitly and explicitly, and how the public sphere of their writing relates to the private sphere of their personal lives. The final chapter examines the AIDS-related works of Herve Guibert, which are both a meditation on and an exploration of...

The subject of this original and provocative work is the white male body, a counterpoint in gender studies to the many readings of the representation of the female body. To look at the construction of this figure, the author examines a group of discontinuous works that are representative of the discontinuity in the intermittent representation of the male body. Especially in nineteenth-century narrative, where Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant write astutely on the subject, there is never continuity in representing the male body. "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Bel-Ami are...

This collection of fifteen essays deals with the representations, theories, and problematics of homosexuality in French writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though focusing on literature, it also includes other self-conscious writing, such as medical discourse and lexicography. The authors examine how homosexuality is a component in the representation of ideology, desire, and structures in the nineteenth century, and how, in the twentieth century, homosexuality emerges in its own right as a subject for representation and study. Drawn from insights of the past twenty years, the...

This book focuses on the extension of realist writing toward alterity, toward otherness, in its ongoing efforts to enable individuals to speak and be heard correctly. Through a series of close readings of six authors from Balzac to Proust, the author shows the ways realist narrative engages the problem of bringing the other into the realm of the discursively representable. The acts of representation involved in that development were not necessarily coterminous with either the representation of the exotic and its attendant stereotypes or with the representation of individuals themselves. The...

Subversions of Verisimilitude focuses on the ways in which a number of French literary narratives written in the realist tradition show a dynamic balance between the desire of the author/narrator to present a verisimilar world and the need for aesthetic balance. While the works studied-narratives by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Colette, Proust, and Sartre-range over the course of a century, from 1835 to 1938, they share a perspective on the relations between and the need to engage questions of realist verisimilitude and narrative interest and aesthetics. The book discusses some of the subversive...