Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Frost, Laura Catherine, 1967-

Title Sex drives : fantasies of fascism in literary modernism / Laura Frost
Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2002

Copies

Description 1 online resource (viii, 197 pages) : illustrations
Contents Fascism and sadomasochism: the origins of an erotics -- The libidinal politics of D.H. Lawrence's "leadership novels" -- The surreal swastikas of Georges Bataille and Hans Bellemer -- Beauty and the Boche: propaganda and the sexualized enemy in Vercors's Silence of the sea -- Horizontal treason: Jean Genet's Funeral rites -- "Every woman adores a fascist": Marguerite Duras, Sylvia Plath, and feminist visions of fascism -- "This cellar of the present."
Summary Salvador Dalí's autobiography confesses that "Hitler turned me on in the highest," while Sylvia Plath maintains that "every woman adores a Fascist." Susan Sontag's famous observation that art reveals the seamier side of fascism in bondage, discipline, and sexual deviance would certainly appear to be true in modernist and postwar literary texts. How do we account for eroticized representations of fascism in anti-fascist literature, for sexual desire that escapes the bounds of politics?Laura Frost advances a compelling reading of works by D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, and Sylvia Plath, paying special attention to undercurrents of enthrallment with tyrants, uniforms, and domination. She argues that the first generation of writers raised within psychoanalytic discourse found in fascism the libidinal unconscious through which to fantasize acts-including sadomasochism and homosexuality-not permitted in a democratic conception of sexuality without power relations. By delineating democracy's investment in a sexually transgressive fascism, an investment that persists to this day, Frost demonstrates how politics enters into fantasy. This provocative and closely-argued book offers both a fresh contribution to modernist literature and a theorization of fantasy
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-189) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Print version record
Subject Fascism in literature.
Sex in literature.
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
PSYCHOLOGY -- Human Sexuality.
Fascism in literature
Literature, Modern
Sex in literature
Fascisme dans la littérature.
Sexualité -- Dans la littérature.
Littérature -- 20e siècle -- Thèmes, motifs.
Erotik Motiv
Faschismus Motiv
Literatur
Fascism in literature.
Sex in literature.
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
Geschichte 1914-1962.
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2001003179
ISBN 9781501724251
1501724258