In an era when both Church and State assigned gender roles and defined sexual practices in terms of male/female, lawful/illicit, Sade's extensive accounts of sexual activity were categorized as deviant, prurient or provocative. William F. Edmiston explores how Sade's unique challenge to sexual, moral and social taboos anticipates the discourses of queer theory. Following an overview of queer theory, Edmiston examines the categories of sex, gender and sexuality as treated in some of Sade's best- and lesser-known works. He demonstrates the extent to which Sade erodes the boundaries of sexual opposition through discourses justifying rather than illegitimizing 'unlawful' sex. The author reveals the coexistence of two competing discourses on sexuality: a proclivity that cannot be eradicated, and a habit that one can choose to adopt. This pioneering re-reading culminates with an examination of how recent biographies attempt to force Sade into a normal/abnormal dichotomy, manipulating police reports, personal correspondence or narratorial interventions to establish (or not) the author's homosexuality. Through revealing Sade's attempts to undermine prevailing gender roles and sexual identities, Edmiston uncovers a 'queer' discourse that challenges the still common assumption that heterosexuality is exclusively natural and normative, and that nature has always prompted humans to reproduce, rather than to seek pleasure.

William F. Edmiston revises current theories of what narratologists call "focalization" and applies his revised theory to four eighteenth-century French memoir-novels.

Hindsight and Insight contributes to our knowledge of the history and evolution of the novel by demonstrating that France's earliest novelists were already engaged in the kinds of narrative experimentation that are usually associated with modern writers. It presents an analysis of the narrative point of view in both its theoretical aspects and its practical applications. Edmiston exposes the inadequacies of current concepts of focalization and proposes a revised concept that is applicable to personal narration, one that can accommodate all the focal possibilities available to the first-person narrator. He applies this concept to four French memior-novels: Les Egarements du coeur et de l'esprit by Marivaux, Manon Lescaut by Prevost, and La Religieuse by Diderot.Each of these well-known novels offers a different case study and raises specific theoretical questions of selective focalization, forms of reported speech, problems of temporal ambiguity, manipulation of the reader, narratorial reliability, and cognitive privilege. Edmiston's study proposes a reading of the novels that resolves certain problems of interpretation raised by other recent studies.