Writing at first anonymously and later under the pen name Pierre Loti, French author Julien Viaud (1850-1923) produced a series of fictions that sympathetically portrayed male same-sex desire and its accompanying societal conflicts. Due to the constraints of the time, Viaud had to develop various strategies for discussing his subject covertly; his success in doing so is demonstrated by the great critical and commercial success he enjoyed during his lifetime, which included his election to the French Academy at age forty-one. Richard Berrong presents a gay reading of the novels and novellas of Julien Viaud, chronologically tracing his development of a distinct homosexual identity and the strategies that he employed to discuss it in a way that would not be obvious to the general public. In so doing, Berrong asserts that Viaud's development of a homosexual identity undermined and realigned dominant constructions of masculinity, presented the need for gay community, and elaborated the role of literature for gay men. The first book-length gay reading of Viaud's corpus, this work will make an important contribution not only to the study of Viaud, but also to the study of gay and lesbian history, culture, and literature.

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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.”

This book comprises various chapters which explore a variety of topics related to the manner in which ideological and epistemological changes in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries shaped the Spanish language, literature, and film, among other forms of expression, in both Spain and Latin America, and how these media served the purpose of spreading ideas and demands. There are articles on ideological representations of linguistic differences and sameness; linguistic changes associated with loan words and the ideas they bring in modifying our communicative landscape; the role of the Catholic religion on the construction of our dictionary; analysis of some political discourses, ideologies and social imaginaries; new visions of old literature (a return to the parody in the Middle Ages to analyze its moderness) and postmodern narrative; discussions on contemporary Spanish poetry and Central American literature; a new return to the liberation philosophy by analyzing Ellacuría´s work; and several studies about concepts such as capitalism, patriarchy, identity, masculinity, homosexuality, globalization, and the Resistence in several forms of expression.