Foucault and Literature: Towards a Geneaology of Writing

This book aims to provide a detailed introduction to the whole body of Foucault's work, with a particular emphasis on his literary theory. The author examines Foucault's early studies of transgressive writing from Sade and Artaud, to the French new novelists of the 1960s, and his later concern with the genealogy of the author/intellectual, writing and theorizing within specific, historical mechanisms of social control and production. Foucault and Literature offers a critique both of Foucault and of the literary studies that have been influenced by him, and goes on to develop new methods of post-Foucauldian literary/cultural analysis.