""The Misfit of the Family" is an impressive fruition of theory precisely mobilized to decipher as never before the remarkable flowering of queer sexualities in Balzac's epochal oeuvre. We come to see why sexuality is so often liminal, marking as it does those crucial points where one form of capital wants conversion into another. Readers of this remarkable book will not be able to ignore the astonishing machinery of queer sexuality in the formative decades of our modernity."--James Creech, Miami University

Acknowledgments ix
Preface xiii
Introduction: Balzac and Alternative Families 1
1. Legal Melancholy: Balzac's Eugénie Grandet and the Napoleonic Code 31
2. On Not Getting Married in a Balzac Novel 65
Interlude: Balzac and Same-Sex Relations in the 1830s 82
3. Balzac's Queer Cousins and Their Friends 124
4. The Shadow Economy of Queer Social Capital: Lucien de Rubempré and Vautrin 171
Epilogue: Vautrin's Progeny 225
Notes 239
Works Cited 289
Index 303

Michael Lucey is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing.