The first scholars who tackled lesbianism as a serious topic of research decades ago provide an important and useful body of insights and paved the way at a time when women’s studies started to flourish and gain legitimacy, at least in the United States. Many of them conceived of their work as a political gesture, a way of granting visibility to a sexuality—or a homoeroticism—relegated to the margins of society and even, up until then, of academia. The present book in comparative literature, which was originally published in French comes in the wake of these various studies, but addresses the subject the crossroads of literature and history, two disciplines rarely addressed together, of fact and fiction. Hence the term representations in the new title.