par Duriau, Nicolas 
Référence Séminaire French Graduate Research Seminar (2025-02-11: University of Oxford (All Souls College), organisé par Ramani Chandramohan, Aditi Gupta et Catriona Seth)
Publication Non publié, 2025-02-11
Référence Séminaire French Graduate Research Seminar (2025-02-11: University of Oxford (All Souls College), organisé par Ramani Chandramohan, Aditi Gupta et Catriona Seth)
Publication Non publié, 2025-02-11
Communication à un colloque
| Résumé : | [EN] According to the conclusions of my doctoral dissertation, which dealt with long-19th-century French literature (1783-1922), there is a significant decline in the number of novels depicting male prostitution from 1800 to 1830. It seems that the then ‘prostitué’ appeared under the guise of less conspicuous figures, such as the ‘greluchon’, the ‘sigisbée’, or the ‘parvenu’ – who would implicitly engage in sexual activity with women, either for money, or for social prestige – to evade the First Empire’s and the Bourbon Restoration’s censorship. By considering little-known novels by J. P. R. Cuisin, a now forgotten writer of the early 19th century, I intend to better understand how the representations of male prostitution evolved from the libertine fiction of the late 18th century to the realist novel of the 1830s. As Andrew Counter (The Amorous Restoration. Love, Sex, and Politics in Early-Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford University Press, 2016) and Alain Viala (La Galanterie. Une mythologie française, Seuil, 2019) suggest, extramarital and commercial sex remained ubiquitous in the 1800-1830 literary production, but aligned with a poetics of ‘silence’, or ‘refoulement’. My aim is to demonstrate that the ‘Riéniste[s]’, ‘Parasite[s]' and ‘Nulliste[s]’ who merged into Cuisin’s novels not only embodied the Empire/Restoration style ‘prostitué’, but also allegorised an ideological context in which ‘sexual deviances’ appeared through text blanks, or figures of avoidance. |
