Gide's Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing

In this provocative new book, Michael Lucey examines the unstable convergence of sexuality, politics, and literary commitments in Andre Gide's writing of the 1920s and 1930s, when Gide wrote most openly about his homosexuality and participated most actively in left-wing politics. Through close readings of Gide's memoirs, novels, and political tracts, Lucey interrogates both the political content of Gide's ways of reflecting on his homosexuality and the way sexuality inflected his politics.

One of the first modern writers to be "out," Gide used his writings during this period to do more than simply publicize his homosexuality. He wrote in a way that revealed sexuality as an arena where easy distinctions between public and private could be challenged. Gide's work thus addresses not only the psychoanalytic, but also the social and political foundations involved in the formation of private sexual subjectivity; further, it considers how personal, private struggles might be implicated in or lead to more public ones.

Written with precision and elan, Gide's Bent will attract readers interested in modern French literature, political and psychoanalytic literary theory, and Queer Studies, both inside and outside the academy.