Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature From Loti to Genet [Paperback]

In this 2001 book, Hughes explores how cultural centres require the peripheral, and the deviant to define themselves.Hughes explores how cultural centres require the peripheral, the outlawed, and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. He analyses the hierarchies of cultural value which inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyses such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet.Hughes explores how cultural centres require the peripheral, the outlawed, and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. He analyses the hierarchies of cultural value which inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyses such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet.Hughes explores how cultural centers require the peripheral, the outlawed, and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. He analyzes the hierarchies of cultural value that inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyzes such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet.Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Without obligation: exotic appropriation in Loti and Gauguin; 2. Exemplary inclusions, indecent exclusions in Proust's Recherche; 3lC0