This book argues that the most interesting depictions of blindness in French fiction are those which call into question and ultimately undermine the prevailing myths and stereotypes of blindness which dominate Western thought.  Meer

This book mobilizes the unexplored interpretative and critical potential of the taboo as a way of reading accounts of the body in nineteenth-century French fiction.  Meer

References to clothing in the nineteenth-century naturalist novel have traditionally been read merely as examples of descriptive detail. Thompson, in her groundbreaking study on Zola, rescues clothing from the margins of representation, and draws on a wide range of twentieth-century feminist and queer theory to demonstrate that clothing troubles such binary pairs as 'masculine' and 'feminine', 'normal' and 'perverse', 'natural' and 'artificial' that lie at the foundations of Zolian naturalism.  Meer

This book mobilizes the unexplored interpretative and critical potential of the taboo as a way of reading accounts of the body in nineteenth-century French fiction.  Meer