Jean Genet

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Intended as an accessible and challenging introduction to Jean Genet, 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 in particular.

Reviews

Barber has an elegant prose style, elliptical and engaging in about equal measure, and this, together with some judicious quotation from Genets own writings, makes for a provocative and informative critical biography . . . Barber performs what should be the duty of every literary biographer: he leads you back to Genets writing, and makes you wonder once more about the man who made it. * The Compulsive Reader *

Author Bio

Stephen Barber is Professor in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University, Surrey. His books include Fragments of the European City (Reaktion, 1995), Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (Reaktion, 2000), Tokyo Vertigo (2001), Extreme Europe (2001), The Art of Destruction: The Films of the Vienna Action Group (2004), Jean Genet (Reaktion, 2005), Abandoned Images: Film and Film's End (2011) and Performance Projections (2014). The Times has praised his work as brilliant and profound.