The Misfit of the Family - Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality

Examines the portrayal of sexuality in Balzac and the psychoanalytic preoccupations of his critics.

List of contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface xiii

Introduction: Balzac and Alternative Families 1

1. Legal Melancholy: Balzac's Eugénie Grandet and the Napoleonic Code 31

2. On Not Getting Married in a Balzac Novel 65

Interlude: Balzac and Same-Sex Relations in the 1830s 82

3. Balzac's Queer Cousins and Their Friends 124

4. The Shadow Economy of Queer Social Capital: Lucien de Rubempré and Vautrin 171

Epilogue: Vautrin's Progeny 225

Notes 239

Works Cited 289

Index 303

About the author

Michael Lucey

Summary

In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. This book 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.

Product details

• Authors: Lucey, Michael Lucey
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 25.08.2003
• EAN: 9780822331568
• ISBN: 978-0-8223-3156-8
• No. of pages: 344
• Dimensions: 149 mm x 243 mm x 28 mm
• Weight: 603 g
• Series: Series Q; Series Q
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies