Display and Disguise

In a culture increasingly obsessed with the visual, self-image and extreme self-exposure, in which reality is constantly obscured and misrepresented through concealment and spin, the roles display and disguise play in literature, thought and visual culture are particularly prescient. This collection, developed from papers presented at a postgraduate conference in Oxford in September 2008, presents a coherent view of key developments in the notions of display and disguise in French culture and provides a thought-provoking contribution to contemporary criticism. The volume includes essays from both senior researchers and graduate students using close readings and theoretical approaches from the psychoanalytic to the postcolonial. These are arranged in four main sections, dealing with notions of performance, disclosure, illusion and concealment respectively. Drawing on new research in a wide range of periods, in fields including art, photography, theatre, travel writing and the novel, the authors consider the notions of display and disguise in relation to works by artists such as Molière, Flaubert, Proust, Dalí, Vinaver and Sophie Calle. This volume contains ten contributions in English and one in French.

Manon Mathias has recently completed her doctoral thesis on conceptions of vision in the works of George Sand at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the nineteenth-century novel, art-text relations, literary history and relations between literature and the natural sciences. Maria O'Sullivan has recently completed her doctoral thesis on the critical work of Roland Barthes at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include literary theory and contemporary French fiction. Ruth Vorstman has recently completed her doctoral thesis on female dramatists in seventeenth-century France at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include women's writing and culture, the development of proto-feminist ideas, and the processes of adaptation and dramatization.