Few authors have led lives as interesting as that enjoyed by French novelist and travel writer Pierre Loti (1850–1923)—and still fewer have worked so hard to make their lives appear even more romantic than they already were. As a career officer in the French navy, Loti participated in expeditions that took him to locales which even today seem exotic, giving rise to four decades of novels, travelogues, and autobiographical narratives, some of which went through hundreds of editions in France and were translated into dozens of languages. And as Richard M. Berrong reveals in this colorful biography, the extravagances of Loti’s often very public private life were as interesting as his art. With Loti’s financial and artistic success came notoriety, which he delighted in enhancing by staging elaborate costume balls—to which (as one does) he invited the photographic press. The artistically inclined royalty of his day, including Princess Alice of Monaco and Queen Elizabeth of Rumania, sought him out as confidant. Sarah Bernhardt had him write plays for her. And although his parties and hobnobbing with titled nobility hurt his standing as a serious author in his later years, they can do nothing to diminish the legacy of an artist whom Henry James hailed as a “remarkable genius,” “the companion, beyond all others, of my own selection,” and whose writing led Willa Cather to confess “she would swoon with joy if anyone saw traces of Loti in her work.”

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Pierre Loti and the Theatricality of Desire offers an original analysis of patterns of unconscious desire observable in the life and work of the French orientalist writer Pierre Loti. It aims to reconcile attitudes and conduct that have been regarded as contradictory and not amenable to analysis by locating the unconscious urges that motivate them. It looks at the ambiguous feelings Loti expresses towards his mother, the conflicting desires inherent in his bisexuality, and his deeply ambiguous sense of a cultural identity as expressed through his cross-cultural transvestism. The political implications of this reappraisal are also considered, offering a potential reassessment of the apparently exploitative nature of much of Loti's writing. This new reading in terms of the unconscious not only serves as a way of understanding inconsistencies, but also suggests how such new interpretations can offer an alternative way of viewing the hierarchies of power his work portrays on both a sexual and political level. This volume is consequently of interest to those interested in gender studies and sexual politics, and offers a way of appreciating writing that might otherwise appear dated and embarrassingly sexist and colonialist in content to twenty-first century readers.