Provocative, subtle, polemical, reasoned, contentious, witty - this is one of the first works to bring the insights of American gender studies to modern French literature. It focuses on the complex relations between narrative, theory, interpretation and homosexuality in the work of Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, Michel Tournier and Renaud Camus. Specifically, the author shows how, in their work, these authors use homosexuality and its inscriptions as a means of interpretation and develop a homosexual hermeneutics that provides understanding, models of interpretation, and a gearing of the reader's expectations. Each of the authors uses homosexuality to question inherited systems of dominance, power, and semiosis. In examining the work of each of the four authors, Schehr analyses how textuality and sexuality relate to one another.