Title: DESIRING THE DEAD: NECROPHILIA AND NINETEENTHCENTURY FRENCH LITERATURE
Description: "During the nineteenth century, literature shared with the medical and psychological sciences a strategy of examining the most extreme manifestations of human desire. In this study, Lisa Downing rescues necrophilia from the margins of sexuality, relocating it as a symptom and pervasive fantasy of modern subjectivity. Drawing case material from the nineteenth-century French canon, the author brings works by Baudelaire and Rachilde into dialogue with fundamental European texts of sexology and psycho-analysis. She reads against the grain of traditional Freudian theories of sexuality, of conventions of nineteenth-century literary scholarship and of 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."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: French literature, history and criticism, 19th century, Necrophilia, Death in literature, French literature, Themes, motives, History and criticism, Nécrophilie, Mort dans la littérature, Littérature française, Thèmes, motifs, Histoire et critique, 18.25 French literature, Französisch, Literatur, Nekrophilie, Necrofilie, Letterkunde, Frans, Desire in literature