Querelle

Querelle is regarded by many critics as Jean Genet’s highest achievement in the novel—certainly one of the landmarks of postwar French literature. The story of a dangerous man seduced by danger, it deals in a startling way with the Dostoevskian theme of murder as an act of total liberation, and as a pact demanding an answering sacrifice. “It is awesome, perhaps the finest novel I have ever read in my life. It literally sent shivers through me, the sheer beauty of the language, the exquisite perversity of the imagination, the incredible grasp of motivation—it is his most tightly plotted, best organized, most accessible novel. It is a wonder.” —Dotson Rader

Examines the place that Lucrezia Marinella holds within the dominant literary tradition of seventeenth-century Italy as a writer, as well as a woman who lived within a predominantly patriarchal culture.

This bilingual edition of the Three Spanish Querelle Texts is very well-conceived and will attract a wide audience among specialists and non-specialists alike. Francomano provides the first modern English translations of texts that enjoyed European-wide celebrity in the early sixteenth century. Her introduction is the best available summary of our knowledge about Torrellas' two texts and Flores' Grisel y Mirabella. Her translations are more readable than the Spanish texts, dividing Flores' elaborate, rambling sentences into more comprehensible discourse. She often captures the tone of ambiguous or mock sincerity in the pleadings of both Flores' and Torrellas' characters. Francomano has a special sensitivity to the ludic quality of these discourses which helps readers appreciate their expression of "male anxiety" and "female agency" in the gender politics of their era.

Sebastian Stuart's quest for self-discovery leads to a sad and shocking understanding of his family history and the price of grief denied.

Shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize • Winner of the 2023 ReLit Award for Fiction Homage to Jean Genet’s antihero and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of the Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge. As a millworkers’ strike in the northern lumber town of Roberval drags on, tensions start to escalate between the workers—but when a lockout renews their solidarity, they rally around the mysterious and magnetic influence of Querelle, a dashing newcomer from Montreal. Strapping and unabashed, likeable but callow, by day he walks the picket lines and at night moves like a mythic Adonis through the ranks of young men who flock to his apartment for sex. As the dispute hardens and both sides refuse to yield, sand stalls the gears of the economic machine and the tinderbox of class struggle and entitlement ignites in a firestorm of passions carnal and violent. Trenchant social drama, a tribute to Jean Genet’s antihero, and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of France’s Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.

In a French bordello, a young sailor meets a murderer who also is his supposed brother.

"Eighteenth-century French cultural life was often characterised by quarrels, and the arrival of Viennese composer Christoph Willibald Gluck in Paris in 1774 was no exception, sparking a five-year pamphlet and press controversy which featured a rival Neapolitan composer, Niccolo Piccinni. However, as this study shows, the Gluck-Piccinni controversy was about far more than which composer was better suited to lead French operatic reform. A consideration of cultural politics in 1770s Paris shows that a range of issues were at stake: court versus urban taste as the proper judge of music, whether amateurs or specialists should have the right to speak of opera, whether the epic or the tragic mode is more suited for drama reform, and even: why should the public argue about opera at all? Mark Darlow is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Cambridge."

A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the first of its kind to engage with this important figure. Twenty-eight essays by an international group of scholars consider this controversial director's contribution to German cinema, German history, gender studies, and auteurship. A fresh collection of original research providing diverse perspectives on Fassbinder’s work in films, television, poetry, and underground theatre. Rainer Werner Fassbinder remains the preeminent filmmaker of the New German Cinema whose brief but prolific body of work spans from the latter half of the 1960s to the artist’s death in 1982. Interrogates Fassbinder’s influence on the seminal ideas of his time: auteurship, identity, race, queer studies, and the cataclysmic events of German twentieth century history Contributions from internationally diverse scholars specializing in film, culture, and German studies. Includes coverage of his key films including: Gods of the Plague (1970), Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Martha (1973) (TV), World on a Wire (1973), Effi Briest (1974), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Fox and His Friends (1975), Fear of Fear (1975), Chinese Roulette (1976), In a Year With 13 Moons (1978), Despair (1978), The Third Generation (1979), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) (TV), and Querelle (1982).