The steady development of queer theory over the last two decades has provided useful analytical tools and the will to dismiss the watchdog of heteronormativity. Modes of reading have evolved, as this volume of FLS amply attests. Following Bill Edmiston’s introduction to the volume — a concise and informative history of queer theory — the fifteen articles reveal, not surprisingly, significant diversity. One deals with queerness in the context of medieval writing where allegorical and euphemistic expression were understood to be irreconcilable. Another treats translations in Early Modern France of an Ovidian fable that had an inconvenient lesbian dimension. Rousseau’s fixation on his bottom (e.g., for spankings) points to a queer streak, while Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin enhances the theme of sexual misidentity with ornamental figures. The queerness of Sand’s La Mare au diable emerges in the course of a contrasexual reading. A musicologist investigates the possibility of a lesbian esthetics of music in a work by Erik Satie, while a literary scholar finds evidence of Proust’s “outing” in Jean Santeuil. Other articles address the sense of gender transformation wrought by sodomy, a revised view on the writing subject in Jean Genet’s fiction, the queerness of heterosexuality in the works of Michel Houellebecq, and recurring motifs in recent fiction produced by “gay Paris.” Two of the articles treat activism and esthetics in film.

This book explores the modern cultural history of the queer martyr in France and Belgium. By analyzing how popular writers in French responded to Catholic doctrine and the tradition of St. Sebastian in art, Queering the Martyr shows how religious and secular symbols overlapped to produce not one, but two martyr-types. These are the queer type, typified first by Gustave Flaubert, which is a philosophical foil, and the gay type, popularized by Jean Genet but created by the Belgian Georges Eekhoud, which is a political and pornographic device. Grounded in feminist queer theory and working from a post-psychoanalytical point of view, the argument explores the potential and limits of these two figures, noting especially the persistence of misogyny in religious culture.

Preliminary Material /Buford Norman and James Day -- France's First Revolution: Hamlet and the "Unresolved Man" of 1589 /George Hoffmann -- On Civility: The Model of Sparta in Montaigne's "Defence de Seneque et de Plutarque" /Sue W. Farquhar -- Of Cannibals, Credo, and Custom: Jean de Léry's Calvinist View of Civilization in Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil (1578) /Scott D. Juall -- Bien m'en avés rendu le conte: Redeeming economies in Yvain /Marcella Munson -- La Civilisation du goût: Savoir et saveur à la table de Louis XIV: (ou, Gastéréa et l'histoire de la cuisine française au dix-septième siècle) /Béa Aaronson -- Un idéal de la culture française entre humanisme et classicisme: "civiliser la doctrine" /Emmanuel Bury -- De la société de salon à la société de cour: l'ambivalence du processus de civilisation /Sophie Rollin -- Les traces ineffaçables de la civilisation dans Paul et Virginie /Murielle Perrier -- Work, Machines, and Vapors in Late Eighteenth-Century France /Laura Balladur -- La représentation des populations noires dans l'œuvre de Paul Morand: enjeux idéologiques et politiques /Nicolas Di Méo -- Roman et société dans la France contemporaine /Denise Brahimi -- L'image de la France dans le dialogue de Gaulle-Sirius: Suprématie politique et leadership humaniste /Liliane Ayad Toss -- Civilité: une certaine modalité du vivre-ensemble /Hélène Merlin-Kajman.

"The New North-African Trend, Coming Out áa l'Orientale"--Cover.

“I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad,” Lord Queensbury challenged Oscar Wilde in the courtroom—which erupted in laughter—accusing Wilde of posing as a sodomite. What was so terrible about posing as a sodomite, and why was Queensbury’s horror greeted with such amusement? In Oscar Wilde Prefigured, Dominic Janes suggests that what divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite, but whether or not it mattered that people could appear to be sodomites. For many, intimations of sodomy were simply a part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life. Oscar Wilde Prefigured is a study of the prehistory of this “queer moment” in 1895. Janes explores the complex ways in which men who desired sex with men in Britain had expressed such interests through clothing, style, and deportment since the mid-eighteenth century. He supplements the well-established narrative of the inscription of sodomitical acts into a homosexual label and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by teasing out the means by which same-sex desires could be signaled through visual display in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Wilde, it turns out, is not the starting point for public queer figuration. He is the pivot by which Georgian figures and twentieth-century camp stereotypes meet. Drawing on the mutually reinforcing phenomena of dandyism and caricature of alleged effeminates, Janes examines a wide range of images drawn from theater, fashion, and the popular press to reveal new dimensions of identity politics, gender performance, and queer culture.

This volume brings together scholars from across disciplines and continents in order to continue to analyse, query, and deconstruct the complexities of bodily existence in the modern world. Comprising nine essays by leading and emerging scholars, and spanning issues ranging from literature, history, sociology, medicine, law and justice and beyond, Talking Bodies vol. II is a timely and prescient addition to the vital discussion of what bodies are, how we perceive them, and what they mean. As the essays of this volume demonstrate, it is imperative to question numerous established presumptions about both the manner by which our bodies perform their identities, and the processes by which their ownership can be impinged upon.

Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France was inspired by the observation that small slips of the flesh (involuntary confessions of the flesh) are omnipresent in early modern texts of many kinds. These slips (which bear similarities to what we would today call the Freudian slip) disrupt and destabilize readings of body, self, and text—three categories whose mutual boundaries this book seeks to soften—but also, in their very messiness, participate in defining them. Involuntary Confessions capitalizes on the uncertainty of such volatile moments, arguing that it is instability itself that provides the tools to navigate and understand the complexity of the early modern world. Rather than locate the body within any one discourse (Foucauldian, psychoanalytic), this book argues that slips of the flesh create a liminal space not exactly outside of discourse, but not necessarily subject to it, either. Involuntary confessions of the flesh reveal the perpetual and urgent challenge of early modern thinkers to textually confront and define the often tenuous relationship between the body and the self. By eluding and frustrating attempts to contain it, the early modern body reveals that truth is as much about surfaces as it is about interior depth, and that the self is fruitfully perpetuated by the conflict that proceeds from seemingly irreconcilable narratives. Interdisciplinary in its scope, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France pairs major French literary works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (by Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, Madame de Lafayette) with cultural documents (confession manuals, legal documents about the application of torture, and courtly handbooks). It is the first study of its kind to bring these discourses into thematic (rather than linear or chronological) dialog. In so doing, it emphasizes the shared struggle of many different early modern conversations to come to terms with the body’s volatility. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.