Stolen Limelight

* The analyses of texts within this title draw on a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches, including techniques of framing and still-life from art-historical criticism and museum studies, psychoanalytic theories of hysteria and mourning, literary theories of melodrama, gender theory, performance theory and more. * The study explores an unusual range of novels, from canonical French works published in the early 1900s to a colonial fiction from the 1950s to a 1965 detective narrative to an autofiction of the 1990s. In this way, this text offers a thumbnail glimpse of the history of the twentieth-century novel in French. * The range of works studied, as well as interdisciplinary approaches applied, is nonetheless tautly controlled and focused by the argument. Specifically, the book explores the ways narratives set up scenarios of display, only to displace the viewer or reader they seem to solicit. Narrative manipulation of visual strategies at work between text and reader has been insufficiently studied, and this book aims to correct this gap.

Dynamics of display in gendered contexts put toward purposes of resistance are explored across six modern canonical and popular novels in French - including an African Francophone fiction and a murder mystery - as well as their selected film adaptations.Who has not, in a favored moment, 'stolen the limelight', whether inadvertently or by design? The implications of such an act of display - its illicitness, its verve, its vertiginous reversal of power, its subversiveness - are explored in this book. Narrative crafting and management of such scenarios are studied across canonical novels by Gide, Colette, Mauriac, and Duras, as well as by African Francophone writer Oyono and detective novelist Japrisot. As manipulated within narrative, acts of display position a viewer or reader from whom response (from veneration or desire to repugnance or horror) is solicited; but this study demonstrates that display can also work subversively, destabilising and displacing such a privileged spectator. As strategies of displacement, these scenarios ultimately neutralise and even occult the very subject they so energetically appear to solicit. Powered by gendered tensions, this dynamic of display as displacement works toward purposes of struggle, resistance or repression.