In this book, Mairead Hanrahan examines the shifts in political focus in Genet's writing, from the erotic fantasies of the early novels to the struggle for emancipation of the Palestinians in the posthumously published Un Captif amoureux. She argues that his texts have always been profoundly concerned with power relations, challenging from the very beginning the opposition that traditionally confines the political to the public sphere. Genet's writing has always been political - but Hanrahan argues also that it was never only political. On the contrary, a tension always existed for him between the poetic and the political. Genet's changing focus from the personal to the public is related to a shift in his poetics, notably at the level of genre. Exploring how genre and politics are inextricably involved in Genet's writing, Hanrahan highlights a central paradox. This writer who remained constant throughout his life in his opposition to hegemonic power structures grappled throughout his work with the suspicion that his art may serve to shore up the very structures he unreservedly contests.