Literary Influence
The novel was an enormous influence on the Beats, with its free-flowing, highly poetic language mixed with argot/slang, and its celebration of lowlifes and explicit descriptions of homosexuality. It is elegantly transgressive, and its self-reflexive nature prefigures the approach to language developed later by the post-structuralists. Jacques Derrida wrote on Genet in his book Glas, and Hélène Cixous celebrated his work as an example of écriture feminine. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his famous Saint Genet as an analysis of Genet's work and life but most especially of Our Lady of the Flowers. Our Lady of the Flowers made Genet, in Sartre's mind at least, a poster child of existentialism and most especially an embodiment of that philosophy's views on freedom.
Read more about this topic: Our Lady Of The Flowers
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