Sheridan presents a literary biography of one of the most important writers of the 20th century--an intimate portrait of the reluctantly public man, whose work was deeply and inextricably entangled with his life. 35 halftones.

Modernism After the Death of God explores the work of seven influential modernists. Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger criticized the destructive impact that they believed Christian sexual morality had had or threatened to have on their love life. Although not a Christian, Freud criticized the negative effect that Christian sexual morality had on his clinical subjects and on Western civilization, while Virginia Woolf condemned how her society was sanctioned by a patriarchal Christian authority. All seven worked to replace the loss or absence of Christian unity with non-Christian unifying projects in their respective fields of philosophy, psychiatry, or literature. The basic structure of their main contributions to modernist culture was a dynamic interaction of radical fragmentation necessitating radical unification that was always in process and never complete.

Originally published in 1989. This is the first history of modern France to explore the long-term origins of the libertarian revolt. It traces the moral history from the eighteenth century to the 1960s, examining the questions of marriage and divorce, homosexuality, and sexual morality. It includes detailed chapters on the Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, André Gide, and Daniel Guérin in order to illustrate the changing legislation, popular thought and public opinion. The result is an enlightening and provocative account which will be of interest to students of modern French history, moral thought and the history of sexual attitudes.

Reissuing seven works originally published between 1977 and 1992, this collection offers a varied selection of surveys of historical practices and attitudes to sexuality, from complete reviews of changing attitudes through time, to individual studies of France in the 19th and 20th Centuries and England in the 17th. This set will be of interest in sociology, gender studies, cultural studies and history.