Description: Hughes explores how cultural centers require the peripheral, the outlawed, and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. He analyzes the hierarchies of cultural value that inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyzes such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet.
Brief description: Edward J. Hughes is Reader in modern French literature at Royal Holloway College at the University of London.
Review Quotes: "In Writing Marginality, the critical act is treated responsibly as an integrated, multi-leveled reading on literary, biographical, cultural, and historical fronts. This book shoots for all the marbles, and the reader leaves the game with arms full." MLN