Peter Cryle

Professor Peter Cryle’s research interests include representations of psycho-sexual pathology in popular and middle-brow French fiction of the fin-de-siècle. He also has a strong interest in the literature of libertine enlightenment in French.

BA (Queensland), MA (Queensland), DU (Nice)

Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques, FAHA

Peter Cryle is the author of Bilan Critique : "L'Exil et le royaume" d'Albert Camus. Essai d'analyse (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1973); Roger Martin du Gard, ou De l'intégrité de l'être à l'intégrité du roman (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1984); The Thematics of Commitment: The Tower and the Plain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Geometry in the Boudoir: Shifting Positions in Classical French Erotic Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); The Telling of the Act: Eroticism as Narrative in French Fiction of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Delaware: Delaware University Press, 2001); La Crise du plaisir, 1740-1830 (Lille: Septentrion, 2003). He is co-editor, with Lisa O'Connell, of Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty, and Licence in the Eighteenth Century (London: Palgrave, 2003).

Recent articles and book chapters include "Etat présent de la critique sadienne", Dix-Huitième Siècle, 31, 1999, 507-524; "Beyond the Canonical Sade", Paragraph, Vol. XXIII, 1, March 2000, 15-25; "Making Room for Women in Pornographic Writing of the Early Nineteenth Century: Entre chien et loup, by Félicité de Choiseul-Meuse", in Lloyd and Nelson (eds) Women Seeking Expression, Monash, Monash Romance Studies, 2001, 11-23; "Petite-maîtrise: The Ethics of Libertine Foppery", Esprit Créateur, 2003, and "Le Marbre féminin", Revue des Sciences Humaines, 2003.

He is currently preparing a book on representations of psycho-sexual pathology in popular and middle-brow French fiction of the fin-de-siècle, tentatively entitled The Pathological Unknown.