Deconstruct changing representations of homosexuality with this important new work of cultural criticism!Homosexuality in French History and Culture explores episodes, patterns, and images of same-sex attraction in France from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, from the essays of Michel de Montaigne to pride parades in contemporary Paris. This groundbreaking book documents the ways homosexuality has been named, experienced, regulated, understood, and imagined. During these ...

"A thrilling frock-by-frock account . . . energetic and alive with [Weber's] own feminine pleasure at a beautiful dress or an outrageous pouf." — Entertainment Weekly (grade: A)Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation f...

**The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.“Robert Darnton has the inquisitiveness of an investigative reporter, the thoroughness of a rigorous scholar, and the sensitivity of a novelist.” —New Republic**When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously ...

"A fascinating evocation of changing styles of personal and public expression. . . ."--Robert Lekachman, Saturday Review

In this seminal work, Foucault examines the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it."From 1971 until his death in 1984, Michel Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous Collège de France. Attended by thousands, these were pivotal events in the world of French letters. Abnormal, the first of thirteen volumes published by Picador, delves into the fascinat...

In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests--so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice--was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasizes the continuities between old and new, in contra...

For two hundred years after the French Revolution, the Republican tradition celebrated the execution of princes and aristocrats, defending the Terror that the Revolution inflicted upon on its enemies. But recent decades have brought a marked change in sensibility. The Revolution is no longer judged in terms of historical necessity but rather by “timeless” standards of morality. In this succinct essay, Sophie Wahnich explains how, contrary to prevailing interpretations, the institution of T...

Collecting David Harvey's finest work on Paris during the second empire, Paris, Capital of Modernity offers brilliant insights ranging from the birth of consumerist spectacle on the Parisian boulevards, the creative visions of Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola, and the reactionary cultural politics of the bombastic Sacre Couer. The book is heavily illustrated and includes a number drawings, portraits and cartoons by Daumier, one of the greatest political caricaturists of the nineteenth ...

Nina Kushner's Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris brings to life a vibrant but relatively unknown part of early modern urban life, the world of the demimonde, the quasi-respectable underworld, with its elite prostitutes, wealthy patrons, and juicy scandals.... Kushner reveals the complexity and influence of this corner of Parisian social and cultural life and its relative separateness from the larger world of prostitution...

François Cusset, author of the acclaimed book French Theory, investigates the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars in this thought-provoking and free-minded journey across six centuries of literary classics and sexual polemics.Cusset presents the foundations and rationale for American queer theory, the field of study established in the 1990s and promulgated by writers and scholars such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael W...

The release of Denys Arcand's Le Déclin de l'empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire) in 1986 marked a major turning point in Quebec cinema. It was the first Québécois film that enjoyed huge critical and commercial success at home and abroad. Arcand's tragicomedy about eight intellectuals gathered around a dinner table relating sexy anecdotes became the top-grossing film of all time in Quebec and was the first Canadian feature to be nominated for an Oscar in the forei...

The French revolts of May 1968, the largest general strike in twentieth-century Europe, were among the most famous and colourful episodes of the twentieth century. Julian Bourg argues that during the subsequent decade the revolts led to a remarkable paradigm shift in French thought - the concern for revolution in the 1960s was transformed into a fascination with ethics. Challenging the prevalent view that the 1960s did not have any lasting effect, From Revolution to Ethics demonstrates tha...