Roman d’un Inverti

Roman d’un Inverti

by: Anonymous

Isn’t pleasure everything here below? And doesn’t it justify everything? What do we demand of life if not pleasure? And when we have it, what do we want more of? Ah! How foolish I was to have despaired! But now, how I’ve made up for lost time. [...] As for me, such as I was born, I will live, and as such I will die.

Published:
1889
Pages:
75pp (2008)
Genres:
Languages:
  • English,
  • French

About:

Novel of an Invert in English. After sending an epistolary summary of his life to Émile Zola to be made into a character, a gay man discovers that Zola had instead given his 1889 confessions to a sexologist to publish in 1896. Emboldened, the anonymous man then writes a joyous, flippant update to describe his loves and affirm his right to love other men.

Editions

  • Paris: Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle (1894), Vol 9, page 212.
  • University of Nebraska Press (2008) in Queer Lives: Men’s Autobiographies from Nineteenth-Century France as "Novel of an Invert." Translated by William A. Peniston and Nancy Erber. (ISBN: 978-0803260368)
  • Paris : Les Nouvelles Éditions Jean-Michel Place (2017) as Confessions d’un homosexuel à Émile Zola. Première édition non censurée du « roman d’un inverti ». Edited by Michael D. Rosenfeld. Unexpurgated. (ISBN: 9782376280033)
  • Columbia University Press (2022) as The Italian Invert: A Gay Man’s Intimate Confessions to Émile Zola. Edited by Michael D. Rosenfeld and William A. Peniston, translated by Nancy Erber. Unexpurgated. (ISBN: 978-0231204897)

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