Stolen Limelight
Gender, Display and Displacement In Modern Fiction in French
9781786838605
Distributed for University of Wales Press
Stolen Limelight
Gender, Display and Displacement In Modern Fiction in French
A study of the revelatory and displacing effects of display in twentieth-century French literature.
Spotlights ask spectators to desire or recoil from an object, yet they also transform the object into something unrecognizable. In Stolen Limelight, Margaret E. Gray traces these moments of illicit visibility through six twentieth-century French fictions, including canonical novels by Gide, Colette, Mauriac, and Duras as well as African Francophone writer Oyono and detective novelist Japrisot. Attentive to gendered tensions, Stolen Limelight teases out the displacing, destabilizing effects of display.
Spotlights ask spectators to desire or recoil from an object, yet they also transform the object into something unrecognizable. In Stolen Limelight, Margaret E. Gray traces these moments of illicit visibility through six twentieth-century French fictions, including canonical novels by Gide, Colette, Mauriac, and Duras as well as African Francophone writer Oyono and detective novelist Japrisot. Attentive to gendered tensions, Stolen Limelight teases out the displacing, destabilizing effects of display.
256 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2022
French and Francophone Studies
Literature and Literary Criticism: Romance Languages
Table of Contents
Preface i
Introduction 1
Part I: Embodied Display and Effects of Displacement
Ch. 1: Staging the Hyperfeminine: Colette 41
Ch. 2: ‘Stripped Naked’: Dismantling Gender in Oyono’s Une vie de boy 91
Ch. 3: Disappearance as Display: Beyond the Strait Gate in Gide 123
Part II: Narrating Display, Narrating Displacement
Ch. 4: Framing Monstrosity in Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux: ‘Buried Hearts’ and ‘Filthy Bodies’ 161
Ch. 5: ‘Girl Stuff’: Genre, Masquerade and Displacement in Japrisot’s Piège Pour Cendrillon
194
Ch. 6: Spectacular Scripts: Transgendering the Mad Mother in Duras’s Different Lover(s)
243
Conclusion 277
Bibliography
Introduction 1
Part I: Embodied Display and Effects of Displacement
Ch. 1: Staging the Hyperfeminine: Colette 41
Ch. 2: ‘Stripped Naked’: Dismantling Gender in Oyono’s Une vie de boy 91
Ch. 3: Disappearance as Display: Beyond the Strait Gate in Gide 123
Part II: Narrating Display, Narrating Displacement
Ch. 4: Framing Monstrosity in Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux: ‘Buried Hearts’ and ‘Filthy Bodies’ 161
Ch. 5: ‘Girl Stuff’: Genre, Masquerade and Displacement in Japrisot’s Piège Pour Cendrillon
194
Ch. 6: Spectacular Scripts: Transgendering the Mad Mother in Duras’s Different Lover(s)
243
Conclusion 277
Bibliography