Jean Genet

Stephen Barber

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781861891785
• eBook ISBN:
  9781861895936
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

With an introduction by Edmund White This new short biography and critical work cuts directly to the essence of Genet’s life, a life of extraordinary spectacle that was always profoundly entangled with his work. Stephen Barber emphasises those elements that made his life particularly inspirational in the 1960s and which continue to make it vital for readers today. Genet’s work is a distillation of preoccupations and reinventions of crucial matters - sex, desire, death and revolution - all of which became mediated in the form of his own travels, imprisonments, sexual and emotional relationships, political engagements and protests.

The book focuses directly on moments in Genet's life in which those preoccupations are vividly projected for the reader. Genet’s novels, theatre works and film projects have been hugely influential for a vast array of writers, film-makers, choreographers and theatre directors, especially at moments of social crisis. Genet has also been an ambivalent icon for the gay movement, for transvestite cultures and for creative and revolutionary individuals internationally.

This book will appeal to a wide range of readers: those engaged with sexual, gender, political and revolutionary issues, all of which are illuminated by Genet’s life and work. It will also appeal to extensive readerships of students, of history, literature, theatre, film and visual media.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Edmund White
• 1 - Jack’s Hotel
• 2 - Jean Genet, the Bastard
• 3 - The Criminal Child
• 4 - The Mettray Colony
• 5 - Crossings of Europe
• 6 - Genet’s Prisons
• 7 - Our Lady of the Flowers
• 8 - Miracle of the Rose
• 9 - Genet in Occupied Paris
• 10 - Jean Cocteau: Flaming Creature
• 11 - Funeral Rites
• 12 - Genet in Liberated Paris
• 13 - Querelle of Brest
• 14 - Genet’s Hotel Rooms
• 15 - The Thief’s Journal
• 16 - Lucien, Java, Decimo
• 17 - Nico Papatakis and Genet
• 18 - Un Chant d’Amour
• 19 - The Penal Colony
• 20 - Genet’s Film Projects
• 21 - The Cock and the Anus
• 22 - The Screens
• 23 - Unrest in the Theatre
• 24 - Genet’s Fragments
• 25 - Rembrandt and the Wound
• 26 - Giacometti
• 27 - The Tightrope-Walker
• 28 - Death, Suicide, Silence
• 29 - Paule Thévenin and Genet
• 30 - Genet in Japan
• 31 - Genet and the Destruction of America
• 32 - The Palestinians: Love and Death
• 33 - The Brutal Gesture
• 34 - A Loving Captive
• 35 - Larache and London
• 36 - Pages Torn from the Book of Genet
• References
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Photographic Acknowledgements