Genet's Genres of Politics

Mairéad Hanrahan

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Research Monographs in French Studies 50

Legenda

22 April 2023  •  218pp

ISBN: 978-1-781887-11-0 (hardback)  •  RRP £95, $120, €120

ISBN: 978-1-781884-38-6 (paperback, 18 December 2025  )  •  RRP £14.50, $18.50, €16

ISBN: 978-1-781884-39-3 (JSTOR ebook)

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In this book, Mairéad Hanrahan examines the shifts in political focus in Genet’s writing, from the intimate fantasies of the early novels to the struggle for emancipation of the Palestinians in the posthumously published Un Captif amoureux. She argues that his texts have always been centrally concerned with power relations, challenging from the very beginning the opposition that traditionally confines the political to the public sphere. Genet’s writing has always been political — but Hanrahan argues also that it was never solely political. On the contrary, a tension always existed for him between the poetic and the political.

Genet’s changing focus from the personal to the public is explored via the shifts in his practice of genre. Analysing how genre and politics are inextricably involved in Genet’s writing, Hanrahan highlights a core paradox in its evolution. This writer who remained constant over the course of his life in his opposition to hegemonic power relations grappled throughout his work with the suspicion that his art may serve to shore up the very structures he unreservedly contests. Yet his writing also testifies, in both what it says and what it does, to the idea that literature is fundamentally at odds with the social order of the world.

Mairéad Hanrahan is Professor of French at University College London.

Reviews:

  • ‘Mairéad Hanrahan’s new book posits and indeed comprehensively demonstrates that Genet’s profound concern with power, whether in the structure of class, gender, sexuality, or racialization, is evident from his earliest writings... Chapters three and four, frequently founded on unpublished archival documents from the Institut Mémoire de l’Édition Contemporaine, including letters, speeches, and notes in various stages of completion ranging from comments scribbled in an immediate reaction to something, to substantial texts clearly written with a view to publication, are most revelatory.’ — Clare Finburgh Delijani, H-France 24.71, December 2024

For a contents listing, see this volume at JSTOR.

Bibliography entry:

Hanrahan, Mairéad, Genet's Genres of Politics, Research Monographs in French Studies, 50 (Legenda, 2023)

First footnote reference: 35 Mairéad Hanrahan, Genet's Genres of Politics, Research Monographs in French Studies, 50 (Legenda, 2023), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Hanrahan, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Hanrahan, Mairéad. 2023. Genet's Genres of Politics, Research Monographs in French Studies, 50 (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Hanrahan 2023: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Hanrahan 2023: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

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