Overview

Is it really a man’s world? At a time when masculinity is being challenged, this book explores the links between reading and writing and how they have historically been associated with masculine privilege. This book focuses on the representation of masculinity as a literary concept in Decadent literature by Huysmans, Lorrain, Rachilde, and Mirbeau to demonstrate how the movement both appropriated and subverted patriarchal assumptions surrounding reading and writing. The author takes a broad approach towards masculinity and its discontents by uncovering unlikely pretenders to the throne – witches, dandies, and cuckolds – destabilising its validity. By positioning the study against the backdrop of the fi n-de-siècle «crisis» of masculinity, the book undermines previously held assertions about the nature of masculinity then and now, opening up fresh ground for the appraisal and analysis of gender in French studies and beyond. This book was Joint Winner of the 2019 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Nineteenth-Century French Studies.

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9781800791756

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Reviews

In a lively and engaging style, Rickard deploys contemporary queer and masculinities theories to bring to light a Decadent poetics of masculinity. This is an impressive work which traces a trajectory from Decadent literature to representations of queer identities in twentieth and twenty-first century French literature. (Nigel Harkness, Newcastle University) In this provocative and engaging contribution to nineteenth-century masculinity studies that focuses on the poetics of non-normative decadent types in selected novels by J.-K. Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Rachilde and Octave Mirbeau, Rickard invites us to reflect on what it means to be a man at the fin de siecle. (Jane Desmarais, Goldsmiths, University of London)

Author Information

Mathew Rickard studied French and Spanish literature and culture at Queen’s University Belfast, where he recently earned his PhD in French studies. He is currently maître de langue at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne’s antenna campus in Beauvais, France. He has presented and published his work in English and French in the UK, Ireland, and mainland Europe. His broader research interests include book culture, intertextuality, transgression and gender studies, with a particular focus on masculinities and queer theory.

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