Desiring the dead : necrophilia and nineteenth-century French literature / Lisa Downing.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Downing, Lisa.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Necrophilia.

Death in literature.

French literature--19th century--Themes, motives.

French literature.

French literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Themes, motives.

Physical Description:

146 pages ; 22 cm

Other Title:

Necrophilia and nineteenth-century French literature

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Legenda, European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2003.

Summary:

In the nineteenth century, literature shared with the medical and psychological sciences a strategy of examining the most extreme manifestations of human desire. Drawing case material from the nineteenth-century French canon, the author brings works by Baudelaire and Rachilde into dialogue with key European texts of sexology and psychoanalysis. She reads against the grain of traditional Freudian theories of sexuality, and feminist critiques of the 'masculine' morbid aesthetic in order to bring to light a model of desire whose problematic nature afflicts existing discourses about sexuality and gender in nineteenth-century France and beyond.

Contents:

1 From Sade to Sexology 18

2 Immobilizing Impulses: Death in Psychoanalysis 46

3 The Poetics of Baudelaire's Liebestod 67

4 Rachilde and the Death of Gender 92.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [133]-142) and index.

ISBN:

1900755653

OCLC:

52792919