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

Michael Lucey

Published by Duke University Press 2003

The Misfit of the Family

Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality

Michael Lucey
Edited by: Michèle Aina Barale , Jonathan Goldberg , Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

In the series Series Q

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822385165

Overview
Contents

About this book

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

Author / Editor information

Michael Lucey is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing.

Reviews

“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 Comédie 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 œuvre. 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, Miami University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
Introduction Balzac and Alternative Families Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter one Legal Melancholy: Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and the Napoleonic Code Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
Chapter two On Not Getting Married in a Balzac Novel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
Interlude Balzac and Same-Sex Relations in the 1830s Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	82
Chapter three Balzac’s Queer Cousins and Their Friends Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
Chapter four The Shadow Economy of Queer Social Capital: Lucien de Rubempré and Vautrin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Epilogue Vautrin’s Progeny Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	289
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	303

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 340

eBook

Published: August 25, 2003
ISBN: 9780822385165