Sapphic fathers : discourses of same-sex desire from nineteenth-century France /

After a fine introduction to French social history from 1848 through the Belle Epoque, Schultz (Brown), also author of The Gendered Lyric (1999), begins investigating the "literary lesbian" through poetry. To illustrate the large output by male authors, representatives of a masculinity threatened by political upheaval and by women's increasing demands (only after 1900 did French women address the topic), Schultz moves from Baudelaire's essays and poems to Verlaine. She next explores popular fiction, notably that of the enormously successful Adolphe Belot, and follows with the "elite novel" (Zola and others). The breadth of Schultz's scholarship is perhaps more evident when she reaches into scientific and medical texts to examine their "cross pollination" with literature. Finally, through the lens of this "patrimony," she looks at mid-20th-century North American misogynistic pulp fiction and nonfiction, again mostly penned by men. Schultz discusses marketing and popular success (indeed the University of Toronto Press dared its own nontraditional marketing, displaying on the book's jacket one of pulp fiction's "lurid covers"). The scholar of 19th-century France will recognize this wide-ranging, deeply researched, beautifully expressed study of both elite and popular culture as a major contribution. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Annabelle M. Rea, emerita, Occidental College