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Gender and sexuality
 28 other titles

Legenda: Oxford, 2003
£35.00 ($65.00 US)  Paperback  156pp
ISBN: 1-900755-65-3

During the nineteenth century, literature shared with the medical and psychological sciences a strategy of examining the most extreme manifestations of human desire. In this groundbreaking study, Lisa Downing rescues necrophilia from the margins of sexuality, relocating it as a symptom and pervasive fantasy of modern subjectivity. Drawing case material from the nineteenth-century French canon, the author brings works by Baudelaire and Rachilde into dialogue with foundational European texts of sexology and psychoanalysis. She reads against the grain of traditional Freudian theories of sexuality, of conventions of nineteenth-century literary scholarship and of feminist critiques of the ‘masculine’ morbid aesthetic in order to bring to light a model of desire whose problematic nature afflicts existing discourses about sexuality and gender in nineteenth-century France and beyond.

Lisa Downing is Lecturer in French at Queen Mary, University of London. She has published on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, gender studies and cinema. She is the author of a forthcoming book on the film director Patrice Leconte.