Martin Crowley

This guide introduces you to the life and work of one of the greatest ninteenth century novelists. In this guide Eliot's themes are explored with reference to her major novels. Both contemporary and modern critical approaches to her work are clearly considered and presented.

Marguerite Duras

This is a major new account of the work of one of France's most significant authors. Subjecting Duras's entire written oeuvre to an unprecedented level of close reading, it demonstrates the vital presence of ethical questions in her work, and develops an important new model of the relation between writing and our ethical life.

Making the Broken Whole

Duras, Writing, and the Ethical

This volume presents a series of essays which consider the ways in which the death scenes of different writers have inflected the reception of their work. Figures and topics addressed include: Molière, Mayakovsky, Pasolini, Proust, Dennis Potter, Foucault; the death mask, the literary encomium and the place of the critic in relation to this scene. Of interest to all those involved in literary studies and critical theory, this collection reveals the moment of death as that which binds life and work together - a relation which, here, is as urgent as it is impossible.

The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers

Dying Words

Victoria Best

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this, the first study of this significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies.

Martin Crowley

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