Literature that explored female homosexuality flourished in late
nineteenth-century France. Poets, novelists, and pornographers,
whether Symbolists, Realists, or Decadents, were all part of this
literary moment. In Sapphic Fathers, Gretchen Schultz explores how
these male writers and their readers took lesbianism as a cipher
for apprehensions about sex and gender during a time of social and
political upheaval.
Tracing this phenomenon through poetry (Baudelaire, Verlaine),
erotica and the popular novel (Belot), and literary fiction (Zola,
Maupassant, Peladan, Mendes), and into scientific treatises,
Schultz demonstrates that the literary discourse on lesbianism
became the basis for the scientific and medical understanding of
female same-sex desire in France. She also shows that the
cumulative impact of this discourse left tangible traces that
lasted well beyond nineteenth-century France, persisting into
twentieth-century America to become the basis of lesbian pulp
fiction after the Second World War.
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