The subject of this original and provocative work is the white male body, a counterpoint in gender studies to the many readings of the representation of the female body. To look at the construction of this figure, the author examines a group of discontinuous works that are representative of the discontinuity in the intermittent representation of the male body.
Especially in nineteenth-century narrative, where Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant write astutely on the subject, there is never continuity in representing the male body. "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "Bel-Ami" are flickering, episodic investigations into the male body as subject, as sentient feeling, as the subject of torture or of adulation. Not until the twentieth century can this male subject be continuously represented. Though the male body is often at center stage, in works that treat it as a metonymy of its own phallic and phallocentric power, this body has less often been seen relative to pleasure and pain, to aesthetics, to human vulnerability.
An introductory chapter explores a work by Alberto Moravia, "Io e lui," as well as various manifestations of the male body's most salient part, the penis, in contemporary discourse and aesthetics. Another chapter deals with writings about the forbidden activity of masturbation and focuses on the work of three disparate writers: Paul Bonnetain, Michel Tournier, and Philip Roth.
In the final chapter, the author discusses several works that focus on the representation of the male body during the gay liberation movement in France and the subsequent celebration of the male body, ending with the inscription of the male body in the literature of AIDS. Among the authors discussed are Guy Hocquenghem, Herve Guibert, and Michel Foucault.

The subject of this original and provocative work is the white male body, a counterpoint in gender studies to the many readings of the representation of the female body. To look at the construction of this figure, the author examines a group of discontinuous works that are representative of the discontinuity in the intermittent representation of the male body.
Especially in nineteenth-century narrative, where Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant write astutely on the subject, there is never continuity in representing the male body. "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "Bel-Ami" are flickering, episodic investigations into the male body as subject, as sentient feeling, as the subject of torture or of adulation. Not until the twentieth century can this male subject be continuously represented. Though the male body is often at center stage, in works that treat it as a metonymy of its own phallic and phallocentric power, this body has less often been seen relative to pleasure and pain, to aesthetics, to human vulnerability.
An introductory chapter explores a work by Alberto Moravia, "Io e lui," as well as various manifestations of the male body's most salient part, the penis, in contemporary discourse and aesthetics. Another chapter deals with writings about the forbidden activity of masturbation and focuses on the work of three disparate writers: Paul Bonnetain, Michel Tournier, and Philip Roth.
In the final chapter, the author discusses several works that focus on the representation of the male body during the gay liberation movement in France and the subsequent celebration of the male body, ending with the inscription of the male body in the literature of AIDS. Among the authors discussed are Guy Hocquenghem, Herve Guibert, and Michel Foucault.

French Food offers a smorgasbord of topics on cuisine in modern France, from the invention of French cuisine in the early 1800s to the McDonaldization of that national emblem, the French fry. The editors uses discrete moments in French history to illuminate the intersection of food, nationality, and culture: the origin of modern French gastronomy, the role of food in literature and films from Proust and Colette to detective fiction, public and private meals at the end of the nineteenth century, and the fusion of international cuisines at the turn of this century.

French Food offers a smorgasbord of topics on cuisine in modern France, from the invention of French cuisine in the early 1800s to the McDonaldization of that national emblem, the French fry. The editors uses discrete moments in French history to illuminate the intersection of food, nationality, and culture:
* the origin of modern French gastronomy
* the role of food in literature and films from Proust and Colette to detective fiction
* public and private meals at the end of the nineteenth century and
* the fusion of international cuisines at the turn of this century.

This collection of fifteen essays deals with the representations, theories, and problematics of homosexuality in French writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though focusing on literature, it also includes other self-conscious writing, such as medical discourse and lexicography. The authors examine how homosexuality is a component in the representation of ideology, desire, and structures in the nineteenth century, and how, in the twentieth century, homosexuality emerges in its own right as a subject for representation and study.
Drawn from insights of the past twenty years, the essays reflect the renewed approach of gender and sexuality as they relate to homosexuality and its representation, and they rely on models that differentiate between sexuality and gender and between natural inclinations and social constructs. Despite the wide variety of subjects, critical positions, and authors' backgrounds, what these essays have in common is the willingness of the contributors to go beyond a set of rhetorics, a set of limitations that were a defining moment in the struggle of gay liberation, and its reflection in both creative and critical writing.
The essays are the product of a new stage in the development of gender studies: a look at all the genders, a recognition of a completely destabilized system of genders and sexes, a privileging of the slippages, ambiguities, and tropings among these positions. The essays range from studies of traditional narrative and poetry to readings of medical records, from examinations of twentieth-century narratives of gay liberation to readings of gender in the post-colonial world. For that reason, the editors have given the collection the title "Articulation of Difference," for in that title, beyond gender and genre, is the idea of new production, new worlds, and new ideas.

Realist novels are usually seen as verisimilar representations of the world, and even when that verisimilitude is critically examined (as it has been by Marxist and feminist critics), the criticism has referred to extra-literary matters, such as bourgeois ideology or defects in the portrayal of women. This book takes as its thesis that the point defining realism is the point at which the processes of representation break down, a sort of black hole of textuality, a rent in the tissue.
The author argues that our notions of continuity, of readability, of representability, or our ideas about unity and ideological shift--or even our notions of what is hidden, occulted, or absent--all come from the nineteenth-century realist model itself. Instead of assuming representability, the author argues that we should look at places where the texts do not continue the representationalist model, where there is a sudden falling off, an abyss. Instead of seeing that point as a shortcoming, the author argues that it is equal to the mimetic successes of representation.
After an initial chapter dealing with the limits and ruptures of textuality, the book considers the work of Stendhal, from its early state as a precursor to the later realism to "La Chartreuse de Parme," which shows how the act of communication for Stendhal is always made of silences, gaps, and interruptions. The author then reads several works of Balzac, showing how he, while setting up the praxes of continuity on which his oeuvre depends, ruptures the works at various strategic points. In a chapter entitled "Romantic Interruptions," works of Nerval and the younger Dumas, seemingly unrelated to the realist project, are shown to be marked by the ideological, representational, and semiotic assumptions that produced Balzac.
The book concludes with Flaubert, looking both at how Flaubert incessantly makes things "unfit" and how critics, even the most perspicacious postmodern ones, often try to smooth over the permanent crisis of rupture that is the sign of Flaubert's writing.

This book focuses on the extension of realist writing toward alterity, toward otherness, in its ongoing efforts to enable individuals to speak and be heard correctly. Through a series of close readings of six authors from Balzac to Proust, the author shows the ways realist narrative engages the problem of bringing the other into the realm of the discursively representable. The acts of representation involved in that development were not necessarily coterminous with either the representation of the exotic and its attendant stereotypes or with the representation of individuals themselves. The representation of the other was the extension of discourse to what was previously unrepresentable. The author argues that the unrepresentable is often perceived as oppositional because of the structuring of discourse by hierarchies and metaphysics, whereby any bivalent pair is made into an oppositional pair.

This collection of fifteen essays deals with the representations, theories, and problematics of homosexuality in French writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though focusing on literature, it also includes other self-conscious writing, such as medical discourse and lexicography. The authors examine how homosexuality is a component in the representation of ideology, desire, and structures in the nineteenth century, and how, in the twentieth century, homosexuality emerges in its own right as a subject for representation and study.
Drawn from insights of the past twenty years, the essays reflect the renewed approach of gender and sexuality as they relate to homosexuality and its representation, and they rely on models that differentiate between sexuality and gender and between natural inclinations and social constructs. Despite the wide variety of subjects, critical positions, and authors' backgrounds, what these essays have in common is the willingness of the contributors to go beyond a set of rhetorics, a set of limitations that were a defining moment in the struggle of gay liberation, and its reflection in both creative and critical writing.
The essays are the product of a new stage in the development of gender studies: a look at all the genders, a recognition of a completely destabilized system of genders and sexes, a privileging of the slippages, ambiguities, and tropings among these positions. The essays range from studies of traditional narrative and poetry to readings of medical records, from examinations of twentieth-century narratives of gay liberation to readings of gender in the post-colonial world. For that reason, the editors have given the collection the title "Articulation of Difference," for in that title, beyond gender and genre, is the idea of new production, new worlds, and new ideas.

Provocative, subtle, polemical, reasoned, contentious, witty--this is one of the first works to bring the insights of American gender studies and queer theory to modern French literature. It focuses on the complex relations among narrative, theory, interpretation, and homosexuality in the work of Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, Michel Tournier, and Renaud Camus.

Focusing on works by Rene Crevel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, and Herve Guibert, this book studies how the figures of homosexuality function at the limits of narrative, as part of the deep structure of narrative, and at the border between public and private discourse. The first three chapters follow the difference between inside and outside, between public and private, between what is known and what can only be surmised. The homosexual Rene Crevel, who is both inside Surrealism and outside it, forces us to reread the marginalized figure of homosexuality in Surrealism. Crevel is discussed in light of his most important work, Mon corps et moi, a sustained effort to negotiate the problems of public and private personae. Long before concentrating on Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre often turned to the subject of homosexuality in his writings of the 1930s and 1940s. The figures and forms of homosexuality in Sartre's work are shown to relate to a phenomenology of perception, to a persistence of the relation between vision and knowledge, and to a set of narrative ploys that put Sartre's own relation to homosexuality in a new light. The last of these three chapters focuses on Roland Barthes, with a retrospective glance at Andre Gide, through an examination of their travel and confessional writings. Discourses of homosexuality are related to discourse about social power, dominant structures, and a model of colonialism. The final chapter examines the AIDS-related works of Herve Guibert, which are both a meditation on and an exploration of AIDS, that most public of private phenomena. It also examines the changing relation between public and private, between the outside world and Guibert's innerworld, and between the singularity of literary writing and the nomothetic nature of the public document, all of which change in a world and in an individual affected by AIDS.

Subversions of Verisimilitude focuses on the ways in which a number of French literary narratives written in the realist tradition show a dynamic balance between the desire of the author/narrator to present a verisimilar world and the need for aesthetic balance. While the works studied-narratives by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Colette, Proust, and Sartre-range over the course of a century, from 1835 to 1938, they share a perspective on the relations between and the need to engage questions of realist verisimilitude and narrative interest and aesthetics. The book discusses some of the subversive paths taken in realism and, specifically, in canonical narratives solidly anchored in the tradition. The goal here is to analyze these realist texts, regardless of the narrative mode chosen, in order to see the deviations and detours from realism, mostly for aesthetic ends.The book contributes to our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative and furthers our knowledge of the ways in which critical theory illuminates such canonical works.

This book is a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly.