The virtuous Roman matron Lucretia killed herself in 509 b. C. Her death is considered the cause of the Roman revolt against the Tarquins and the mainspring of the passage from the monarchic to the republican age. It is a myth about private and public dimensions: it tells about woman and revolution. Its themes, permanent features and variations are infinite. The metamorphoses of Lucretia are innumerable. Nonetheless, she has always preserved her essence and profound meaning, thus confirming her strength and her being a true myth. Lucretia has crossed the centuries, she has been told, painted and sung by artists from 509 b. C. until today. She reached the Eighteenth Century, Italy, Great Britain and Germany and she met three great authors: Carlo Goldoni, Samuel Richardson and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. They chose her and decided to tell her story, each in his own peculiar manner. Goldoni wrote a dramma giocoso in musica, Lugrezia Romana in Costantinopoli, Richardson a novel, Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady and Lessing a burgerliches Trauerspiel entitled Emilia Galotti. One myth, three authors, three different literary genres: this work would like to investigate and verify the connection among them and the meaning of it. The comparative analysis of the metamorphoses of Lucretia will disclose new concepts of private and public, of woman and revolution, sprung from an old but perpetual reviving myth.

"The Angel and the Perverts," admirably translated by Anna Livia, offers a glimpse into the subculture of gender ambiguity that was the origin point for today's lesbian and gay communities. As the question concerning the relationship between homosexuality and gender difference is once again being raised, Delarue-Mardrus' novel no longer seems an anachronistic apologia from a more closeted era, but an intriguing exploration of identities that take gender difference, rather than sexuality, as their starting point."
--Will Roscoe, author of The Zuni Man-Woman

Set in the lesbian and gay circles of Paris in the 1920s, The Angel and the Perverts tells the story of a hermaphrodite born to upper class parents in Normandy and ignorant of his/her physical difference. As an adult, s/he lives a double life as Marion/Mario, passing undetected as a lesbian in the literary salons of the times, and as a gay man in the cocaine dens made famous by Colette.

Delarue-Mardrus's novel belongs to a category of literature, written between the turn of the century and approximately 1930, which depicted lesbians as members of a third sex. The hermaphrodite became the visual representation of the ways in which lesbians were different from their heterosexual sisters, and Rene Vivien, Natalie Clifford Barney, Rachilde, and Colette, among others, shared Delarue-Mardrus's fascination with the topic.

This is the first translation into English of The Angel and the Perverts. In an astute introduction, Anna Livia rereads Lucie Delarue-Mardrus as a prolific and significant writer, despite the fact that previous scholars viewed her primarily as the wife of the scholar and translator Joseph-Charles Mardrus.Livia also places Delarue-Mardrus's life in a lesbian context for the first time and decodes this delightful novel so that readers will feel quite at home in Mario/Marion's unusual world, which runs the gamut from Auguste Rodin to Jean Cocteau and Sarah Bernhardt.

In this interdisciplinary book, Livia examines a broad corpus of written texts in English and French, concentrating on those texts which problematize the traditional functioning of the linguistic gender system. They range from novels and prose poems to film scripts and personal testimonies, and in time from the nineteenth century to the present. Her goal is to show that rather than being a case of misguided envy, battles over gendered language are central to feminist concerns. This fresh and exciting scholarship will appeal to linguists and scholars in literary and gender studies.

This is a groundbreaking collection of previously unpublished essays that examine the complex relationship between language and the construction of gender and sexuality. The contributors study a wide range of topics using various methodologies.

Controversy over gendered pronouns, for example using the generic "he," has been a staple of feminist arguments about patriarchal language over the last 30 years, and is certainly the most contested political issue in Western feminist linguistics. Most accounts do not extend beyond policy issues like the official institution of non-sexist language. In this volume, Anna Livia reveals continuities both before and after the sexist language refore movement and shows how the creative practices of pronoun use on the part of feminist writers had both aesthetic and political ends. Livia uses the term "pronoun envy" ironically to show that rather being a case of misguided envy, battles over gendered language are central to feminist concerns.
Livia examines a broad corpus of written texts in English and French, concentrating on those texts which problematize the traditional functioning of the linguistic gender system. They range from novels and prose poems to film scripts and personal testimonies, and in time from the 19th century to the present. Some withhold any indication of gender; others have non-gendered characters. Livia's goal is two-fold; to help bridge the divide between linguistic and literary analysis, and to show how careful study of the manipulation of linguistic gender in these texts informs larger concerns. This fresh and highly interdisciplinary work lies at the intersection of several vital areas, including language and gender, sociolinguistics, and feminist literary analysis.

This pioneering collection of previously unpublished articles on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender language combines queer theory and feminist theory with the latest thinking on language and gender. The book expands the field well beyond the study of "gay slang" to consider gay dialects (such as Polari in England), early modern discourse on gay practices, and late twentieth-century descriptions of homosexuality. These essays examine the conversational patterns of queer speakers in a wide variety of settings, from women's friendship groups to university rap groups and electronic mail postings.
Taking a global--rather than regional--approach, the contributors herein study the language usage of sexually liminal communities in a variety of linguistic and cultural contexts, such as lesbian speakers of American Sign Language, Japanese gay male couples, Hindi-speaking hijras (eunuchs) in North India, Hausa-speaking 'yan daudu (feminine men) in Nigeria, and French and Yiddish gay groups. The most accessible and diverse collection of its kind, Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality sets a new standard in the study of language's impact on the construction of sexuality.

"The Angel and the Perverts," admirably translated by Anna Livia, offers a glimpse into the subculture of gender ambiguity that was the origin point for today's lesbian and gay communities. As the question concerning the relationship between homosexuality and gender difference is once again being raised, Delarue-Mardrus' novel no longer seems an anachronistic apologia from a more closeted era, but an intriguing exploration of identities that take gender difference, rather than sexuality, as their starting point."
--Will Roscoe, author of The Zuni Man-Woman

Set in the lesbian and gay circles of Paris in the 1920s, The Angel and the Perverts tells the story of a hermaphrodite born to upper class parents in Normandy and ignorant of his/her physical difference. As an adult, s/he lives a double life as Marion/Mario, passing undetected as a lesbian in the literary salons of the times, and as a gay man in the cocaine dens made famous by Colette.

Delarue-Mardrus's novel belongs to a category of literature, written between the turn of the century and approximately 1930, which depicted lesbians as members of a third sex. The hermaphrodite became the visual representation of the ways in which lesbians were different from their heterosexual sisters, and Rene Vivien, Natalie Clifford Barney, Rachilde, and Colette, among others, shared Delarue-Mardrus's fascination with the topic.

This is the first translation into English of The Angel and the Perverts. In an astute introduction, Anna Livia rereads Lucie Delarue-Mardrus as a prolific and significant writer, despite the fact that previous scholars viewed her primarily as the wife of the scholar and translator Joseph-Charles Mardrus.Livia also places Delarue-Mardrus's life in a lesbian context for the first time and decodes this delightful novel so that readers will feel quite at home in Mario/Marion's unusual world, which runs the gamut from Auguste Rodin to Jean Cocteau and Sarah Bernhardt.