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.

This book explores the literary and cultural afterlives ofIreland's most enigmatic, shape-shifting and controversial son: Roger Casement.Drawing upon atransnational selection of modern and contemporary texts, alongside significantarchival research, this book positions Casement as a vital and fascinating figure in the compromised and contradictory terrainof Anglo-Irish history.

Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights challenges the general resistance in scholarship and queer studies to approach Yeats and D’Annunzio through a queer lens because of their controversial affiliations with fascism and elitism, their heterosexuality and their venerated canonical status. This book provides the first fully theorised queer and comparative reading of Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama. It offers the novel contention that due to their increasing involvement in queer and feminist subcultures, their plays feature feelings that are associated with queer historiography and generate ideas that began to be theorised by queer studies more than half a century after the composition of the plays. Moreover, it uncovers an alert, subversive and often coded social commentary in eight key dramatic texts by each playwright and at the same time highlights the thus far neglected commonalities between the plays and the queer historical as well as cultural contexts of these two prominent modernists.

Birth of a National Icon examines the emergence of the intellectual in fin-de-siècle France, setting this important phenomenon against the backdrop of an emerging mass democracy and concentrating on the key role played by the avant-garde.

This book argues that Gabonese writer Sylvie Ntsame utilizes her novels to question certain patriarchal traditions and practices in African society (such as polygyny) that, in certain contexts, tend to silence the voice of the female. Through engaging with feminist theories, among other theoretical frameworks, the author demonstrates how, in some of Ntsame’s novels, the black female body is an object of voyeurism that reduces the women to eroticized, exoticized Others. The author further argues that Ntsame counters the dystopia of racism with a depiction of idealized love through an interracial relationship, presented against the backdrop of stereotypes and myths that stifle such relationships. Ntsame does this by going back to her cultural roots, and calling for understanding between peoples of diverse ethnicities and cultures. The book makes valuable contributions to the study of Gabonese women’s writing in particular, and African women’s writing in general.

This book examines Lee Smith's novel-length fiction and its powerful reflection of her personal search for and journey toward spiritual reconciliation. The protagonists of Smith's novels feel estranged from any sense of feminine sacredness as they struggle for a belief system that offers them hope and validation. Chapters describe how Smith has retrieved in her fiction a source of transformative power--the power of the sexual, maternal, feminine divine--in hopes of creating a new image of the total, sacred female whose sexuality, creativity, spirituality, and maternity can reside comfortably in the bodies of everyday heroines.

Nineteenth-century French Realism focuses on metropolitan France, with Paris as its undisputed heart. Through Jennifer Yee's close reading of the great novelists of the French realist and naturalist canon - Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant - The Colonial Comedy reveals that the colonies play a role at a distance even in the most apparently metropolitan texts. In what Edward Said called 'geographical notations' of race and imperialism the presence of the colonies off-stage is apparent as imported objects, colonial merchandise, and individuals whose colonial experience is transformative. Indeed, the realist novel registers the presence of the emerging global world-system through networks of importation, financial speculation, and immigration as well as direct colonial violence and power structures. The literature of the century responds to the last decades of French slavery, and direct colonialism (notably in Algeria), but also economic imperialism and the extension of French influence elsewhere. Far from imperialist triumphalism, in the realist novel exotic objects are portrayed as fake or mass-produced for the growing bourgeois market, while economic imperialism is associated with fraud and manipulation. The deliberate contrast of colonialism and exoticism within the metropolitan novel, and ironic distancing of colonial narratives, reveal the realist mode to be capable of questioning its own epistemological basis. The Colonial Comedy argues for the existence in the nineteenth century of a Critical Orientalism characterized by critique of its own discursive foundations. Using the tools of literary analysis within a materialist approach, The Colonial Comedy opens up the domestic Paris-Provinces axis to signifying chains pointing towards the colonial space.