Never Say I by Michael Lucey

Michael Lucey shows how representations of same-sex sexuality shaped the evolution of twentieth-century French prose. Rethinking the work of Marcel Proust, André Gide and Colette, he examines how each created a first-person voice able to speak about same-sex desire, and how their writing gave form to social groups only slowly gaining public recognition. Drawing on novels, journalism, theater, letters and encounters, Lucey treats the first person as a collectively produced social artifact and shows these writers as both practitioners and theorists of it.