LIEVE SPAAS is Professor of French Cultural Studies at Kingston University. She has published on Rousseau and the eighteenth-century novel and is part of the CNRS Rousseau research team in Paris. Her socio-historical analysis of the correspondence of Catherine de Saint-Pierre to her brother Bernardin appeared in 1996, Lettres de Catherine de Saint-Pierre a son frère Bernardin. She is co-editor with Brian Stimpson of Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, and is general editor of the `Cultural Studies Monographs' series with Berghahn Books.

• Preface Notes on the Contributors Introduction: Mythical Constructs and Social Realities; L.Spaas PART ONE: BIOLOGICAL PATERNITY IN LAW AND LANGUAGE Heredity and Paternity; M.Andreoli The Paternal Role and the Napoleonic Code; X.Martin DNA and the Stakes in Embodying Paternity; C.Mossman Factoring the Father; C.McDonald Heredity of Power and Paternity of the Text in some Medieval Works; Y.de Pontfarcy Pére and Mére: Unequals in Language; P.Bolusset PART TWO: ABSENT FATHERS Life without Father: Revisions of Paternity in Women's Writing in France; J.Birkett Absent Fathers across the Spectrum of Local Colour in the Short Stories of Kate Chopin; J.B.Goodwyn Death of the Father and Birth of Idolatry: from Mme de Sevigne to her Daughter ; A.Cozea The Father-Effect: Rimbaud, Pessoa; J-J.Hamm PART THREE: REINVENTING FATHER Fatherhood in the Works of George Sand; A.Szabo Politics and Fatherhood in the African Novel: Le Chercheur D'Afriques by Henri Lopes ; P.Corcoran Loys Masson: Writing the Father; M.Mongelard Il Papa, Sade's Pater Beyond Compare; B.Fink Kafka's Papa; S.L.Gilman Death with Father in David Copperfield ; J.Nunokawa PART FOUR: PATERNITY, SEX, GENDER AND SUCCESSION Why do Ogres Eat Babies? Monstrous Paternity in Myth and Fairytales; M.Warner Fathers as Mothers: the Myth of Male Parthenogenesis; L.Thomas Dispossessing the Father in the Fiction of Michel Tournier; M.Ferrigan Molière's Disturbing Fathers; T.Gorilovics Shakespeare and the Misrecognition of Fathers and Sons; L.Danson 'Father and Mother is One Flesh': Hamlet and the Problems of Paternity; A.Thompson & N.Taylor Mystical Estates and Legal Fictions: Modernism's Apostolic Successions; S.Smith Epilogue Index