A study of the revelatory and displacing effects of display in twentieth-century French literature.

Spotlights ask spectators to desire or recoil from an object, yet they also transform the object into something unrecognizable. In Stolen Limelight, Margaret E. Gray traces these moments of illicit visibility through six twentieth-century French fictions, including canonical novels by Gide, Colette, Mauriac, and Duras as well as African Francophone writer Oyono and detective novelist Japrisot. Attentive to gendered tensions, Stolen Limelight teases out the displacing, destabilizing effects of display.