Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous

Can fictions of desire determine real pleasures? Do texts regulate the performance of our sexual identities? In Sexuality and the Reading Encounter, Emma Wilson offers a new account of the intimate relations between reading, identity, and identification. Interweaving theoretical debate with analysis of texts by Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous, her study reveals the formative potential and transferential pleasures of the reading encounter.