Shades of Sexuality

Shades of Sexuality: Colors and Sexual Identity in the Novels of Blaise Cendrars, by Amanda Leamon, is currently one of the few studies on the modernist poet and novelist Blaise Cendrars to be written in English. Of interest to scholars of Cendrars, Modernism, Twentieth Century French Literature and early Twentieth Century Art and Humanities, Shades of Sexuality is unique among the growing body of criticism and analysis of Cendrars' fiction in that it explores the ways in which Cendrars makes use of the spectrum of fragmented colors and other elements of disguise and trompe-l'oeil, both as an artistic device in the construction of the fictional tekst, and as a recurrent motif in the representation and exploration of the male subject and his relation to woman. The author demonstrates how Cendrars effects intersections of gender in the tekst through the manipulation of colors and their associations with femininity, ultimately undermining the illusory facade of male autonomy which dominates his fictional corpus.