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...

Realist novels are usually seen as verisimilar representations of the world, and even when that verisimilitude is critically examined (as it has been by Marxist and feminist critics), the criticism has referred to extra-literary matters, such as bourgeois ideology or defects in the portrayal of women. This book takes as its thesis that the point defining realism is the point at which the processes of representation break down, a sort of black hole of textuality, a rent in the tissue. The author argues that our notions of continuity, of readability, of representability, or our ideas about...

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...

The essays collected in this volume address and illuminate a number of works, both canonic and not, in French literature and culture through the use of queer theory as it pertains to a European, and specifically, French, context. The volume brings together studies of classic literature and film, including Balzac, Genet, and Godard, and juxtaposes these works with works by lesser-known artists as well as with implicit and explicit theoretical understandings of "queer." This volume will be of interest to all researchers in French literature and culture and to those interested in the...