Sublime Surrender

When Heinrich Heine left his sick bed in 1848 and stumbled to the Louvre to fall before a statue of the goddess of beauty and lie in the pitying, cold glance she seemed to cast on his prostrate body, he defined a recurring motif of the second half of...

Suzanne R. Stewart is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Stewart's study is an example of how to do gender studies right.

Cogently argued and tightly written.

Carolyn Dean, author of The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject:

An impressive book. In creative and sophisticated readings, Stewart argues that masochism is a ruse by which men at the end of the century constituted their own marginality in order to secure their hegemonic position in new terms. The extension of analysis from the psyche to the relations between the psychic and the cultural mark the book's originality.