| The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality Contributor(s): Lucey, Michael (Author) |
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ISBN: 082233156X ISBN-13: 9780822331568 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $102.55 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: August 2003 Annotation: "Michael Lucey's Balzac is not the Balzac they taught you in college, or even in graduate school. His resourceful readings introduce us to a social universe to which oddballs and misfits are entirely germane because queerness is its norm. Now I understand why Proust so loved Balzac and what Baudelaire learned from him: that the bizarreness of beauty offers a clue to the form of heroism that is truly characteristic of the modern age."--Ross Chambers, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan "Michael Lucey's fine literary analysis, rigorous theorization of sexualities, attention to culture as a contested field, and nuanced historiographical reconstructions show how Balzac's "Comedie humaine," long viewed as the domain of social climbers thrusting aside residual forms of sociabilities, in fact offers a panorama of 'misfits' negotiating the instabilities and faultlines of the family as it is being reinvented in post-Revolutionary France. Lucey's compelling reflection on how literature is emmeshed with the historical construction of private life reveals queer paradigms as central to a genealogy of French modernity."--Margaret Cohen, New York University ""The Misfit of the Family" is an impressive fruition of theory precisely mobilized to decipher as never before the remarkable flowering of queer sexualities in Balzac's epochal oeuvre. We come to see why sexuality is so often liminal, marking as it does those crucial points where one form of capital wants conversion into another. Readers of this remarkable book will not be able to ignore the astonishing machinery of queer sexuality in the formative decades of our modernity."--James Creech, MiamiUniversity |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | European - French - Psychology | Human Sexuality (see Also Social Science - Human Sexuality) |
| Dewey: 843.7 |
| LCCN: 2003001723 |
| Series: Series Q |
| Physical Information: 1.1" H x 5.88" W x 9.58" (1.33 lbs) 344 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - French |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honor de Balzac (1799-1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. The Misfit of the Family reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze--as well as represent--a range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends that in order to grasp the full complexity with which sexuality was understood by Balzac, it is necessary to appreciate how he conceived of its relation to family, history, economics, law, and all the many structures within which sexualities take form. The Misfit of the Family is a compelling argument that Balzac must be taken seriously as a major inventor and purveyor of new tools for analyzing connections between the sexual and the social. Lucey's account of the novelist's deployment of "sexual misfits" to impel a wide range of his most canonical works--Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, Lost Illusions, The Girl with the Golden Eyes--demonstrates how even the flexible umbrella term "queer" barely covers the enormous diversity of erotic and social behaviors of his characters. Lucey draws on the thinking of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and engages the work of critics of nineteenth-century French fiction, including Naomi Schor, D. A. Miller, Franco Moretti, and others. His reflections on Proust as Balzac's most cannily attentive reader suggest how the lines of social and erotic force he locates in Balzac's work continued to manifest themselves in twentieth-century writing and society. |