Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'French literature'
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Mason, Jon-Kris. "French language, and French manners, in eighteenth-century British literature." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.577523.
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Eighteenth-century social and political relationships between Britain and France have long enjoyed great scholarly interest, and the linguistic influence of French on English is being defined with increasing precision. Until now, however, there have been only brief stylistic considerations of the literary role played by French in eighteenth-century English prose literature. My thesis seeks to address that deficiency by investigating the literary usage and significance of French language in English literature. As the period is noted for the explosion of interest in language and its cultural ramifications; this study continuously considers the metonymical function of French usage as a signifier of broader social corollaries. This thesis attempts to forge a link between identifiable social attitudes and their incarnation in specific linguistic usage. I initially set out a context of opinion on French language and culture, and attitudes to borrowing and imitation, derived from journal, essay and treatise. Such a context demonstrates that France is unrivalled as the 'other' against which British identities were forged. Rates of lexical borrowing from French reached an historical low in the eighteenth century, and the proliferation of grammars and dictionaries bespoke a desire to define, limit, and control language. Yet the language of the developing novel, I argue, was inflected with French idiom, an idiom that offered a uniquely rich and potent strain of evocation and association. Writers of the novel, from Richardson and Smollett, to Brooke, and Burney, deploy French flexibly but with precision; each author exercises great control in borrowing idiom for purposes ranging from plot development and characterisation, to satire and pathos. My research explores those constructs, and because I found that the question of literary French usage is gendered, much of my thesis is structured along lines of gender. The letters of Lord Chesterfield, Samuel Johnson, and William Shenstone, Fanny Boscawen, Hannah More, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, form counterpoints to the novel, and establish areas both of commonality and divergence between French usage in the fictional and familiar prose of men and women. In its final chapter, this study turns explicitly to the wider social concerns underlying preceding discussions, viz. the significance of French usage to English manners and morals in the novels ranging from John Cleland's Fanny Hill to Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote. This thesis necessarily incorporates extensive but germane quotation, and embraces historical sociolinguistics, social history, stylistics, literary theory, and practical literary criticism. While this study cannot claim to be comprehensive, it seeks to open out a field of study hitherto neglected.
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Cox, Fiona Mairi. "Virgil's presence in twentieth century French literature." Thesis, University of Bristol, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.296691.
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Hale, Terence John. "Virtue and frenzy : the ideological background of French horror writing, 1820-1836." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 1993. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.385455.
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Durnin, Katherine Joanne. "Métis representations in English and French-Canadian literature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/MQ65030.pdf.
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L'Hostis, Aurelie Marie. "Literature and historical consciousness in the French Caribbean." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609280.
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Gilby, Emma. "Sublimity and selfhood in seventeenth-century French literature." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.426498.
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Payne, Robert Oliver. "Reimagining the family? : lesbian mothering in French literature." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/41211.
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In the last two decades, gay and lesbian parenting has emerged as a highly contentious subject in France. The creation of the Pacte Civil de Solidarité in 1999 and the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption in 2013 testify to the evolution of gay and lesbian parenting from a hidden practice into a public matter. The growing visibility of gay and lesbian parenting has coincided with the emergence of lesbian mothering as a literary theme. While texts portraying lesbian mothers remain small in number, the fact that most were published after 2000 suggests their being on the rise. This thesis engages with this nascent branch of French literature, focusing on ten texts published between 1970 and 2013. It thus encompasses the period from the birth of the modern gay and lesbian movement until the adoption of same-sex marriage in France. It shows how the texts both reflect changes to the family and contribute to political and theoretical debates on gay and lesbian parenting and, more broadly, to the redefining of mothering and family in twentieth- and twenty-first-century France.
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Randall, Lesa Beth. "Representations of syphilis in sixteenth-century French literature." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/284029.
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Syphilis caused unprecedented terror as it rapidly spread through Western Europe at the onset of the sixteenth century. In France, a flourish of literary production specifically about syphilis provides an important record of various reactions to what constituted the first known experience of deadly disease, sexually transmitted. This dissertation examines three types of literary representations of syphilis in texts dating from 1500-1550, by authors as familiar as Rabelais and Jean LeMaire de Belges, in addition to many that remain anonymous. With a foundation of anthropological theories of sickness as danger and pollution, psychoanalytic theory is employed to elucidate the thought processes that led to the pervasive blaming and scapegoating of women, the most common social reaction to syphilis seen in this literature. Organization of texts on the same subject into separate units was achieved by considering the tone with which they deal with syphilis. Chapter One presents and analyses Le Triomphe de Treshaulte et Puissante Dame Verolle, the only known Renaissance compilation of texts about syphilis. Reliance on allegory and myth to explain the origins and causes of syphilis make this text a prime example of socially sanctioned literary reaction to the disease, clearly the most polite discourse found to date. Chapter Two examines the cornucopian representations of syphilis found in Rabelais. As a monk, physician and writer, Rabelais had a unique and varied perspective on the disease. His text imitates, reverses or mocks most common reactions to syphilis while advancing the important message of 'temperance in all things' that forms and informs his works. Twelve popular poems, mostly anonymous, are presented in Chapter Three. Analysis of vivid, realistic descriptions of loss associated with syphilis and a discourse of warning whose foundation rests on the denigration of women demonstrate that these texts were both cathartic and didactic. A compilation and translation of the works discussed in chapters one and three appear as special appendices, so that these cultural artifacts may be considered in future studies of social reaction to deadly, sexually transmitted disease in Renaissance France.
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Trotter, D. A. "Medieval French literature and the crusades : 1100-1300 /." Genève : [Paris] : Droz ; diff. Champion-Slatkine, 1988. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb34929503g.
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Mackervoy, Susan Denise. "Schiller and French classical tragedy." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.357834.
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Boucher, James. "Representations of the Amerindian in French literature and the Post-Imperialist literature of Québec." Diss., University of Iowa, 2016. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2050.
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My research traces the evolution of the French vision of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas by establishing a genealogy of mythic paradigms which frame how French and Quebecois authors understand the Amerindian from 1534 to present. Myth informs French visions of the Amerindian from the earliest periods of contact until the present day. My research reveals the existence of a mythic representational genealogy in the history of French (and Quebecois) letters. Through the written word, reiterations of mythologies of the Native lead to the creation of a crystallized French cultural imaginary of the Amerindian which circumscribes possibilities for reciprocal understandings between French (European) and Native peoples. The Noble and Ignoble Savage, the Ecological Savage (which I also refer to as the nexus of Nature and Native), the Vanishing Indian, and Going Native are the mythologies and narrative technologies that have mediated (and continue to mediate) French thinking about the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Not only have these mythic paradigms determined literary representation, but they have also inordinately influenced the articulation of scientific truth about the Amerindian and the concretization of Native ontological difference from a Eurocentric perspective. The inextricable link between representation and praxis, confirmed by my insights into the mythic origins of scientific discourses (Buffon, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss), cannot be underemphasized.
The original myths in that genealogy are the Ignoble and Noble Savage. The Ignoble Savage myth presents the Amerindian as non-human, animal, or monster, in both moral and physical descriptions. The Noble Savage is an idealized portrait of the purity and innocence of Native peoples that Europeans connect to a simpler time and way of life, often seen as belonging to the past. Texts written by Michel de Montaigne and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are instrumental in the creation and propagation of this myth. An important consequence of the Noble and Ignoble Savage myths is an association of the Native with Nature in the French mind, what I refer to as the French cultural imaginary of the Amerindian. The link between the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Nature is a recurring theme in French texts that represent the Amerindian. The mythologies of the Noble and Ignoble Savage, including the association of the Amerindian with the environment or world of the non-human animal, influence early modern philosophical, religious, scientific and literary images of the Amerindian in French.
In the nineteenth century, the mythic paradigm of the Vanishing Indian becomes the prevailing vision of the Amerindian. Originating in the Noble Savage, the myth of the Vanishing Indian presents the Native as extinct or nearing extinction; images are often characterized by nostalgia and guilt. The inevitability of the disappearance of the Amerindian is a logic that informs representations of the Native in Chateaubriand’s writing and in French Western novels.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, French and Quebecois authors engage in the myth of Going Native. Following the metaphorical disappearance of the Amerindian according to the Vanishing Indian framework, French and French-Canadian characters undertake journeys of self-actualization that are catalyzed by contact with the (myths of the) Native. Through mythologized knowledge of the Native, non-Native characters are transformed into truer versions of themselves. Representations of androgynous and homosexual Native sexualities are significant elements in many narratives of Going Native, which I interpret through a queer critique.
In addition to literary forays, my dissertation focuses on how myths of the Native are presented in French texts that claim to produce scientific truth. In the eighteenth century, the field of natural history uses images of the Native that echo the logic of the Ignoble Savage myth. In the nineteenth century, one of the foundational texts of the discipline of sociology utilizes images of Amerindian gender ambiguity to formulate a distinction between primitive and modern peoples. In my conclusion, I examine how the mythologies traced throughout the study influence the father of structural anthropology in his text Tristes tropiques.
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Sinclair, Fionnùala Ealasaid. "Milk and blood : maternal frameworks in Old French literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/26938.
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The thesis considers the depiction and function of maternal characters within late twelfth and thirteenth-century texts, a topos which varies according to genre. The main generic category of the study is that of the chanson de geste, with additional chapters on romance, and on didactic literature pertaining to women. The ideological constructs of contemporary religious and medical teachings on the feminine/maternal provide an introduction and a background to the study, while modern feminist theory is used as a methodological and critical approach. The first chapter examines the inherent ambiguity of didactic texts, including those by Etienne de Fougères, Raymond Llull and Philippe de Novarre. The prescription of a code of ideal female conduct is here implicitly and constantly undercut by the sexualisation of the female body through the very strategies of writing which would seek to contain it, a problem which appears notably in Robert de Blois' Chastoiement des Dames. The authoritative stance taken by these texts is haunted by a fear that the very prescription of an ideal of behaviour may be symptomatic of failure, a disquiet also given voice by the many negative examples they cite. A tension is thus produced between the projected containment of female sexuality and the intimation that didactic writing always, by form and by content, undercuts its own prescriptive enterprise. Chapter 2 studies the role of the mother in the romance, in particular Guillaume de Dole and La Manekine. These texts reflect the concerns of didactic literature in their emphasis on female chastity and fidelity. Chapters 3-5 then compare the depiction of maternal characters in the chanson de geste. Although chansons de geste (e.g. the Crusade Cycle and Berte as Grans Piés) and romance both appear to subscribe to an idealised and ideologically-conforming model of femininity, in the chanson de geste constructions of the maternal are often undercut by the narrative disquiet which these can produce.
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Hamilton, Juliet Elizabeth. "Representations of folly in late thirteenth century French literature." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.323134.
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Kemp, Simon Robert. "Crime-fiction pastiche in late-twentieth-century French literature." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.619787.
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Bisdorff, Claire Janine. "Essayer des mots : translating French and English Caribbean literature." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609255.
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Harris, Joseph. "Cross-dressing in seventeenth-century French literature and culture." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.398507.
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Russell, Deirdre Doran. "Narrative identities in contemporary French autobiographical literature and film." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.492087.
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This thesis uses concepts of narrative identity to assess the functions and characteristics of storytelling in the articulation of personal and cultural identity in four French literary and filmic autobiographical texts from the 1980s and 1990s: Azouz Begag's novel Le Gone du Chaäba (1986), Claire Denis' film Chocolat (1988), Annie Ernaux's book Journal du dehors (1993) and Dominique Cabrera's film Demain et encore demain (1998). Synthesising various accounts of narrative identity expounded by a range of philosophers, sociologists, psychologists and historians (including Paul Ricceur, David Carr, Jerome Bruner and Adriana Cavarero), the thesis argues that they offer a fruitful approach to autobiographical discourse in terms of the temporal configuration of lived experiences, the blend of historiographical and fictional modes and above all the intersubjective basis of autobiographical identity. The enquiry focuses on evaluating the texts' critical interrogations of the storytelling mode alongside their own uses of narrative. Structured in two parts, the analyses in Part I focus on textual narrative approaches to the intersections and tensions of contested myths and histories in the constitution of hybrid postcolonial identities. Chapter One argues that using a narrative approach to lives and selves to analyse Le Gone du Chaäba yields insights into the formation and expression of identities by individuals located between conflicting traditions and discourses. Chapter Two, on Chocolat, broaches similar territory, but with a greater emphasis on memory processes and the visual dynamics of identity. The analysis probes the film's depiction of the narrative underpinnings of imperialism and its remembrance, as well as how the text develops alternative narrative practices which undermine the totalising knowledge of History in favour of a subjective positioning which foregrounds its own European perspective and limitations. Part II shifts attention to two diaristic works as a means of assessing the validity of the concept of narrative identity regarding texts which appear to eschew the narrative form as the best means of representing lives. Chapter Three, examining Journal du dehors, contends that a spontaneous narrative impulse is crucial to the text's responses to everyday experience and urban public life, and is ultimately expressive of the author's autobiographical identity. Chapter Four focuses on the twofold narrativity of Demain et encore demain: that of living (during the filming), and that of textual revision (during the editing), arguing that the interplay of these two levels and mediation of documentary and fictional registers are central to the therapeutic value of the project. The thesis concludes that while the four texts share a certain scepticism regarding the ideological uses of narrative, they also all express desires to understand and articulate the narrative fabric of lives.
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Ewart, Rebecca Elizabeth. "Translation, interpretation and otherness : Polynesia in French travel literature." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.680152.
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This thesis seeks to explore French travel literature on Polynesia as a form of translation. It analyses how travel writers interpret and textualize their experiences of the foreign culture in order to create a version of Polyneslan otherness. Following on from Lawrence Venuti's theory of foreignization and domestication, it is assumed that all translations necessarily manipulate the source culture into forms that are determined by the receiving culture, and that fidelity to an original is, therefore, impossible. Ethical potential is considered to lie in a translation that goes against the norms of translation present In the receiving culture in respect of Polynesia. The thesis identifies the emergence of over-determined narratives relating to Polynesia in late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth-century French travel literature. It shows how this body of work engaged with pre-existing narratives surrounding New-World cultures and dreams of a utopian south em continent, and considers the emergence of a dominant version of Polynesia closely linked to notions of an earthly paradise. In relation to the tradition of translation established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the thesis studies the translation strategies employed by Pierre Loti in 'Le Mariage de Loti' (1880) and Victor Segalen in 'Les Immemoriaux' (1907). It demonstrates their seminal status as works that set trends for translating Polynesia, in terms of both reinforcing translation norms and subverting them. Finally, the thesis investigates the afterlives of Loti and Segalen's texts, as they appear in operatic adaptations ('Lakme' (1883) and 'L'ile du reve' (189B)), translations Into English, twentieth-century travel literature (Loti), and in indigenous Polynesian writing (Segalen).
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LiBassi, Marguerite. "Specularity in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Art." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2002. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/4.
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In the mid-to-late 1800s, French writers and artists resolved to shed their Romantic skins in favor of new self-conscious "husks"--to borrow Baudelaire's poetic term--that is to say: Naturalism, Realism, Impressionism and Symbolism. Some of the older reformers found themselves in an awkward, transitional stage contrary to the younger vanguardists who bore no allegiance to the past. The first group included Baudelaire, Flaubert, Courbet, Manet, Degas and Pissarro while the latter listed among its most successful members: Zola, Mallarmé, Huysmans, Morisot, Monet, Renoir and Cézanne. This thesis argues that specularity--a sort of mirror mimesis--was part of the fertile, artistic exchange between these representative writers and artists who shaped nineteenth century French literature and plastic arts during a period of turbulent social and political change. It is important not to conventionalize specular-mimesis into an automatic looking glass response between literature and art. Its primary function in this thesis is to single out, investigate and inter-relate literary and artistic chefs-d'oeuvre which, at times, bear remarkably similar hallmarks, for one reason or another. Given that cultivated conversation was highly esteemed by the Parisian bourgeoisie and held to be an elegant art form by salon and soirée intellectuals, four Dialogues constitute the internal structure of this paper. Each Dialogue is preceded by its own Cadre which serves to introduce and familiarize the reader, using a mise-en-scene framework, with background information that supports the discourse.
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Stoll, Jessica. "Imagining Troy : fictions of translation in medieval French literature." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2014. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/imagining-troy(85cde57d-20ef-452b-b079-7dce54c90ae8).html.
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Stories of the Trojan War and its aftermath are the oldest – apart from those in the Bible – to be retold in medieval literature. Between 1165-1450, they catch the imagination of French-language writers, who create histories in and for that burgeoning vernacular. These writers make Troy a place of origins for peoples and places across Europe. One way in which writers locate origins at Troy is through the device of translation. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Benoît de Sainte-Maure and the writers of the prose Troie, the Histoire Ancienne and the Roman de Perceforest all claim to have translated old texts; for Benoît and the prose Troie writers, this text is a Latin copy of an eyewitness account of the Trojan War. The writers thus connect their locations with Troy retroactively, in both space and time. Within this set of highly successful stories, writers’ presentations of translation therefore have important consequences for understanding what is at stake in medieval French textual production. Taking Derrida’s Monolinguisme de l’Autre as my theoretical starting point, this thesis sheds new light on medieval writers’ concepts of translation, creation and origins by asking two questions: • To what extent is translation considered integral to creation and textual production in medieval French texts? • Why does the conceit of translation from a lost source seem to shape narratives even when this source is a fiction? All these writers produce texts in French, or translate from that language, but these texts were written in geographically distinct areas: the Roman de Troie comes from Northern France, the prose Troy traditions are copied mainly in Italy, John Gower wrote in London, Christine de Pizan was at court in Paris and the extant Perceforest manuscripts were produced in Burgundy. The Trojan material therefore inspires writers throughout this period all over Western Europe.
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Lewis, Philippa Rhiannon Grodecka. "Imagining intimacy in French literature and culture, 1830-1870." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708630.
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Sund, Judy. "True to temperament : Van Gogh and French naturalist literature /." Cambridge : Cambridge university press, 1992. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb37667623m.
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Tsaturyan, Christina Ann. "Sport as Art: The Female Athlete in French Literature." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2010. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/2347.
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The modern conception of organized, codified sport originated in Europe during the 19th century. At this time, instructors began to institute the practice of certain physical activities at school as a means of teaching morals, forming character, and initiating social exchange. Sport is particularly appropriate for forming men because of its public, physical nature. The values it instills—courage, strength, leadership—are also decidedly masculine. What, then, is made of the female athlete? Are the noble qualities that sports affirm inapplicable to women? In this thesis, I argue that female participation in sports often leads to masculinization, unless the sport is transformed into a type of “art” or otherwise feminized by focusing on its ability to enhance feminine roles (e.g. mother). This aestheticization/feminization renders female participation acceptable and allows women to receive their own “formation,” increase their aristocratic elegance, and participate in important social exchange. Sometimes these results come at a cost, such as marginalization or sexualization, but there are far fewer examples of such in the works of female authors. Society generally renounced physicality during the 17th and 18th centuries, and “sport” was an exclusively noble activity, so I will look predominantly at works from the 19th century—the period in which sport became codified, and consequently, “masculinized.” Because the 19th century is often considered a “Renaissance of the Renaissance,” I will also reference the 16th century to set the stage.
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Stephens, Joanna. "Italo Calvino and French literary culture." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.390390.
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Mukhopadhyay, Indra Narayan. "Imperial Ellipses France, India, and the critical imagination /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1679371881&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Armstrong, Robert A. "Gleanings in French Fields: A Formal Approach to the Translation of French Poetry." Ohio University Honors Tutorial College / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1587646850156205.
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Shango, Lokoho Tumba. "Roman et écriture de l'espace en Afrique (noire) francophone." Villeneuve d'Ascq : Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1998. http://books.google.com/books?id=sZxcAAAAMAAJ.
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Weitmann, Susan. "Tenebrous femme fatale : the making of the métisse in nineteenth-century metropolitan French literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/2147.
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This thesis examines representations of the ‘métisse’ in nineteenth-century metropolitan French literature to determine the figure’s function and significance in the texts that display her and the larger society that imagines her. By ‘métisse’, I refer specifically to a woman of ‘black’ and ‘white’ ‘racial’ mixture whose identity, in the context of the texts that figure her, both legitimates and deconstructs distinct and discrete ‘racial’ identity. As such, she is a useful figure through which to investigate and unpack conceptions of ‘race’. I will suggest that her innate performative ability – a product of her deceptively white exterior – demonstrates the discursive nature of identity that can be seen as constructed and parodied rather than as a simple ontological category. I use the term ‘tenebrous’ to describe the ‘métisse’ because it conjoins the two constitutive aspects of her signification – her ambiguity and her colour. Her fundamentally ambiguous identity is crucial to her figuration as an erotic and dangerous femme fatale. Unknowable and protean, she attracts and simultaneously disconcerts or terrifies her prey. Concurrently, the term ‘tenebrous’ highlights the explicit colouring of her body by all of the authors who imagine her so as to mark her as identifiably different, and to explain her essential bestial, primitive, and dangerous sexuality. This thesis locates the ‘métisse’ at the crossroads of discourses of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In an era when fears of personal and social degeneracy and decline were capturing the collective imagination, the ‘métisse’, as a figure of frightening alterity and deceptive similitude, embodies deviancy. Primarily portrayed as a natural courtesan due to her essential yet hidden ‘black’ blood, the ‘métisse’ attracts ‘white’ men with her seductive body, but her malign sexuality corrupts, dilutes, or kills them. Associated with the working-class, the prostitute, the criminal, and the savage, the ‘métisse’ fits into a larger discourse that seeks to postulate the normative identity of ‘white’, bourgeois masculinity. Her ability to dilute the ‘purity’ of her ‘white’ male victim articulates a general contemporary fear of pathological sexuality and, through it, invisible degeneration. Using the comparative framework of ‘case studies’, I will examine Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Arthur Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, Pierre Loti’s Le Roman d’un spahi, a selection of poems from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, as well as the critical and biographical studies centring around the figure of Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s long-time and muchmaligned ‘métisse’ partner. The wide variety of texts and the diverse list of authors will demonstrate the surprising currency of this literary figure in the collective imagination of nineteenth-century metropolitan France, as well as twentieth-century literary criticism. By focussing upon well-known and significant French authors, I will reexamine the cultural heritage to which these writers contributed with specific attention to the investigation of cultural assumptions, desires, and fears pivoting around the theme of mixed-race.
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Downing, Lisa Michelle. "Desire and immobility : situating necrophilia in nineteenth-century French literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1999. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ccbb5b9e-58da-4d36-901b-bd71112f3c05.
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Headrick, Ashlee S. Sherman Carol L. "Images of women mentoring women in French literature 1650-1750." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,258.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006.Title from electronic title page (viewed Oct. 10, 2007). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Languages (French)." Discipline: Romance Languages; Department/School: Romance Languages.
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Ferguson, J. "The representation of the Negro in French literature, 1848-1880." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.354777.
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Drugan, Joanna Marie. "Environmental themes in French literature and politics of the 1930s." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.323737.
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Harrington, Katharine N. "Writing outside the box : exploring a nomadic alternative in contemporary French and Francophone literature /." View online version; access limited to Brown University users, 2005. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3174617.
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Brovedan, Corinne. "Images of women in seventeenth-century French novels." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.283299.
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Milligan, Jennifer E. "French women writers of the inter-war period." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.319011.
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Diamond, Ariella. "Hindsight and sexuality in the French Lieutenant's Woman." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/11947.
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The following thesis investigates the role of hindsight and sexuality in The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. In this instance I look closely at the two main characters of the novel, namely Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, and I show the varying levels of freedom that each character displays in a Victorian world.
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Longust, Bridgett Renee 1964. "Reconstructing urban space: Twentieth-century women writers of French expression." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282108.
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This dissertation examines the importance of urban space in the works of feminist writers from France, Quebec, the Maghreb and Francophone West Africa. Each author writes women as subjects of their own experience in the city, identifies the representations of power and gender in urban landscapes, restores a feminist voice to the polis and supports women's claim to enfranchisement in urban space. My analysis is based upon the fundamental premise that urban space reflects power dynamics and is, like gender, a social and political construction borne of a dominant patriarchal ideology. The urban type of the female flaneuse, or ambulant heroine, is prevalent in several of the texts. These are women whose personal trajectories through the metropolis serve as a common referant to define their identity. Exploitation, disciplinary surveillance and disillusion characterize (1) Claire Etcherelli's urban dystopia in Elise ou la vraie vie. (2) Annie Ernaux's observations of life in the periphery of Paris in the Journal du dehors are centered on the market economy of the city and women's status as commodity. The deviant behavior of (3) Andree Chedid's virtually homeless, elderly heroine in La cite fertile thinly veils a provocative inquiry into the notion of urban identity. (4) Christine de Pizan and the Quebecoise writer, (5) Nicole Brossard both employ the metaphor of construction--architectural and textual--and share utopian visions of women's writing as the site for feminist praxis and cultural transformation. (6) Nina Bouraoui's cloistered Algerian heroine in La Voyeuse interdite and the women in (7) Assia Djebar's novels dare to defy and transgress the boundaries which exclude women from the urban realm in the Maghreb. (8) Calixthe Beyala's novels depict young African women struggling with issues of identity and survival in metropolises dominated by a repressive, patriarchal mentality. Throughout the texts, the city appears in multiple guises: as a text, a body, a marketplace, and a prison. For these authors, writing on the city constitutes a feminist act asserting women's right to claim a voice in that space. These works situate the city as a locus of cultural and political critique, whose spatial configurations reflect the social constructions of gender.
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Bazgan, Nicoleta. "Irresistibly French: Female Stardom And Frenchness." The Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1217959177.
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Emery, Meaghan Elizabeth. "Writing the fine line : rearticulating French National Identity in the divides. A cultural study of contemporary French narrative by Jewish, Beur, and Antillean authors /." The Ohio State University, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1382548822.
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Santos, Kedrini Domingos dos. "Aspectos impressionistas em Bel-ami de Guy de Maupassant /." Araraquara, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/93859.
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Orientador: Guacira Marcondes Machado LeiteBanca: Brigitte Monique Hervot
Banca: Márcio Natalino Thamos
Resumo: O escritor francês Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) é comumente associado às Escolas realista e naturalista. Acreditamos, todavia, diante de sua abertura para todas as formas de fazer poético, que seu romance Bel-Ami (1885) apresenta características que permitem uma aproximação com a estética impressionista. Tal relação pode ser pensada a partir de alguns aspectos caros aos impressionistas, como o olhar e o ponto de vista subjetivo, os quais são projetados em um momento e de um determinado lugar. Nessa perspectiva, a ideia do movimento torna-se relevante, tendo em vista que as coisas mudam, transformam-se com o tempo e, por conseguinte, o modo de olhá-las. Como se trata de pontos de vista subjetivos, o que vemos é a apresentação de sensações e impressões, as quais monstram-se insuficientes para expressar o todo complexo que é o objeto, aliás, inapreensível. Na construção desse objeto, sua relação com as coisas que o circundam também deve ser levada em consideração, pois evidencia ainda mais sua complexidade. As cores, igualmente, correspondem a outra característica impressionista relevante. Acreditamos, pois, que é possível observar o mundo em Bel-Ami, a partir dessas questões, embora seja necessário o distanciamente para que se possa reconstruí-lo
Résumé: L'écrivain français Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) est généralement associé aux Ecoles réalistes et naturalistes. Nous croyons, cependant, devant son ouverture à toutes les formes du faire poétique, que son roman Bel-Ami (1885) présente des caractéristiques qui permettent de l'approcher de l'esthétique impressionniste. Cette relation peut être considérée par certains aspects chers aux impressionnistes comme le regard et le point de vue subjectif. De ce point de vue, l'idée de mouvement devient importante, em gardant à l'esprit que les choses changent et se transforment avec le temps et, par conséquent, la façon de les regarder. Comme ce sont des points de vue subjectifs, ce que nous voyons, c'est le résultat de sensations et d'impressions qui se révèlent insuffisantes pour exprimer la complexité de l'objet, en effet, insaisissable. Dans la construction de cet objet, sa relation avec les choses qui l'entourent doivent également être prise en considération, parce qu'elle manifeste encore plus sa complexité. Les couleurs correspondent aussi à une autre caractérististique impressionniste pertinente. Nous croyons donc qu'il est possible d'observer le monde dans Bel-Ami à partir de ces questions, malgré la nécessité d'une distance qui permette de le reconstruire
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Assunção, Islene França de. "O universo autoficcional de J. M. G. Le Clézio : Voyage à Rodrigues, Onitsha, L'Africain e Ritournelle de la faim /." Araraquara, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/183155.
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Orientador: Ana Luiza Silva CamaraniBanca: Adalberto Luis Vicente
Banca: Andressa Cristina de Oliveira
Banca: Betina Ribeiro Rodrigues da Cunha
Banca: Luciana Moura Colucci de Camargo
Resumo: Voyage à Rodrigues, Onitsha, L'Africain e Ritournelle de la faim são textos que acompanham as mutações da literatura francesa contemporânea, seguindo as tendências da escrita de si, mas, ao mesmo tempo, distanciando-se da linha tradicional da biografia e da autobiografia e assemelhando-se à nova forma recentemente surgida no universo autobiográfico, identificada como autoficção. Tendo em vista que a necessidade de compreensão de si mesmo exige uma interrogação concernente ao passado e à origem, nessas obras, os protagonistas empreendem uma viagem no tempo e no espaço rumo ao passado, a fim de narrar fatos da infância, da vida dos pais e antepassados ou de alguma pessoa que tenha importância em suas histórias de vida. Traduzindo um desejo geral da própria época corrente, a obra de Le Clézio confirma a obstinação dos escritores contemporâneos em encontrar a herança perdida e evitar a irremediável passagem do tempo. Esse retorno ao passado constitui uma partida cujo fim é a busca de si mesmo, uma vez que, no esforço de descobrir as origens, os heróis manifestam o desejo de recuperar a identidade perdida, de suprir uma falta e/ou de restituir a dignidade roubada a um dos membros de suas famílias. A viagem (real ou figurada) e a escrita tomam, por conseguinte, uma dimensão iniciática, já que se desvelam como produtos de uma busca identitária, assumindo o papel de mediadoras do autoconhecimento e de preservação da memória, devido à capacidade de resistir à passagem do tempo, fazend... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo)
Résumé: Voyage à Rodrigues, Onitsha, L‟Africain et Ritournelle de la faim sont des récits qui accompagnent les mutations de la littérature française contemporaine en suivant les tendances de l'écriture de soi, mais en même temps s' éloignent de la voie traditionnelle de la biographie et de l'autobiographie et se rassemblent à la nouvelle forme née récemment dans l'univers autobiographique, identifiées comme «autofiction ». Étant donné que le besoin de la compréhension de soi-même exige une interrogation concernant le passé et l'origine, dans ces oeuvres les protagonistes entreprennent un voyage vers le passé dans le temps et dans l'espace, afin de raconter des faits de leur enfance, de la vie de leurs parents, de leurs ancêtres ou de n'importe quelle personne qui a de l'importance dans leurs histoires de vie. En traduisant une envie générale à la propre époque actuelle, l'oeuvre leclézienne va attester l'obstination des écrivains contemporains de retrouver l'héritage perdu et d'éviter l'irrémédiable passage du temps. Ce retour au passé va constituer un départ dont le but est la quête de soi-même, car dans l'effort de découvrir les origines, les héros expriment le désir de retrouver l'identité perdue, de pallier un manque ou de restituer la dignité enlevée à un des membres de leurs familles. Le voyage (réelle ou figurée) et l'écriture prennent, par conséquent, une dimension initiatique, puisqu'ils se montrent comme des produits d'une quête identitaire en jouant le rôle de médiateurs d... (Résumé complet accès életronique ci-dessous)
Doutor
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Carter, Elizabeth Lee. "Taming the Gypsy: How French Romantics Recaptured a Past." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13064929.
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In this dissertation, I examine the evolution of the Gypsy trope in Romantic French literature at a time when nostalgia became a powerful aesthetic and political tool used by varying sides of an ideological war. Long considered a transient outsider who did not view time or privilege the past in the same way Europeans did, the Gypsy, I argue, became a useful way for France's writers to contain and tame the transience they felt interrupted nostalgia's attempt to recapture a lost past.
My work specifically looks at the development of this trope within a thirty-year period that begins in 1823, just before Charles X became France's last Bourbon king, and ends just after Louis-Napoleon declared himself Emperor of France in 1852. Beginning with Quentin Durward (1823), Walter Scott's first historical novel about France, and the French novel that looked to it for inspiration, Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), I show how the Gypsy became a character that communicated a fear that France was recklessly forgetting and destroying the monuments and narratives that had long preserved its pre-revolutionary past. While these novels became models in how nostalgia could be deployed to seduce France back into a relationship with a particular past, I also look at how the Gypsy trope is transformed some fifteen years later when nostalgia for Napoleon nearly leads France into two international conflicts and eventually traps the French into what George Sand called a dangerous "bail avec le passé." In new readings of Prosper Mérimée's Carmen (1845) and George Sand's La Filleule (1853), I argue that both authors personify the dangers of recapturing the past, albeit in two very different ways. While Mérimée makes nostalgia and the Gypsy accomplices, George Sand gives France an admirable Gypsy heroine, a young woman who offers readers a way out of nostalgia's viscous circle. I conclude by arguing that nostalgia and this Romantic trope found their way back into France at the dawn of a new millennium, and the Gypsy has once again been typecast in art and politics as deviant for refusing to dwell in or on the past.Romance Languages and Literatures
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Jenkins, Clare Helen Elizabeth. "Jansenism as literature : a study into the influence of Augustinian theology on seventeenth-century French literature." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1983/3ab04713-bc11-46a5-8604-507e1d753038.
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This study investigates the effects of Jansenist theology on seventeenth-century French literature. After an initial explanation of the history of the Jansenist movement and its specific beliefs, there then follows a study into some of the works produced by members of this group. These citations have also been used in order to trace the development of the movement over the seventeenth century. For the purpose of this research, the term J ansenism has been taken to refer to the movement in the seventeenth century and has not been extended into the following century. Once this description has been given, the following four chapters each deal with an individual author and their connection to the Jansenist movement. Their principle works are then studied in order to ascertain the level of influence exerted by this form of religious piety on their literary output. Chapter Two deals with Pascal and concentrates on his Lettres Provinciales and Pensees. Chapter Three studies La Rochefoucauld's Maximes, which are a prime example of the pessimistic view of mankind that was so prevalent during this century. Chapter Four looks into two of Madame de Lafayette's novels, La Princesse de Cleves and La Comtesse de Tende. Chapter Five then studies Racine, a figure whose personal connections with the Jansenist movement, and subsequent estrangement from it, have been well studied. Finally the Conclusion draws together the findings from these chapters and demonstrates how the movement's own development led to changes in how Jansenist doctrine affected the literature of the seventeenth century.
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Wooler, Stephanie. "Performance Anxiety: Hysteria and the Actress in French Literature 1880-1910." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10246.
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My dissertation uses close readings of four texts dealing with the actress, spanning the naturalist novel (Zola’s Nana, 1880, and Edmond de Goncourt’s La Faustin, 1882), autobiography (Sarah Bernhardt’s Ma double vie, 1907) and autobiographical fiction (Colette’s La Vagabonde, 1910), in order to examine late nineteenth-century representations (and self-representations) of the actress in relation to the discourse of hysteria. I argue that in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France, pathology and performance came together in the stereotype of the hysterical actress. In the wake of the French Revolution, and the subsequent political upheavals of the nineteenth century along with the emergence of a consumer capitalist society, \(fin-de-si\grave{e}cle\) society was living a moment of particular anxiety. This anxiety found a focal point in the hystericised figure of \(la com\acute{e}dienne\), who came to embody a threatening blurring of gender and class distinctions. Actresses were pathologised in a discursive gesture which sought to identify and contain the threat which they were seen to pose, and which seemed to offer an objective narrative which re-established boundaries and identities. The discourse of hysteria, however, was by no means as secure or monolithic as it might seem. I argue that the discourse of hysteria is underpinned by a fundamental performativity which has the potential to be profoundly subversive. By examining different modalities of response to the phenomenon of the hystericisation of the actress, I show how in both male and female-authored texts the discourse of pathology is undermined and reappropriated in a way which foreshadows twentieth-century feminist theories.Romance Languages and Literatures
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Cronin, Susan Joan. "Digital text and physical experience : French digital literatures between work and text." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/289127.
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This thesis takes into consideration the presence of computers and electronic equipment in French literary and multimedia discussions, beginning in the first chapter with the foundation of the Oulipo group in 1960 and taking as a starting point the group's conceptions of the computer in relation to literature. It proceeds in the second chapter to explore the materialities and physical factors that have informed the evolution of ideas related to the composition and reading of digital texts, so as to illuminate some of the differences that may be purported to exist between e-literatures and traditional print works. Drawing on Roland Barthes' 'Between Work and Text,' the chapters gradually progress into an exploration of spatiality in digital and interactive literatures, taking into account the role of exhibitions in accommodating and diffusing these forms in France, notably the 1985 exhibition 'Les Immatériaux,' to whose writing installations the third chapter is dedicated. The first three chapters thus focus on computer assisted reading and writing prior to 1985. The chapters that form the second half of the thesis deal with more recent years, exploring online and mobile application works, reading these as engendering their own distinct physical spaces that extend beyond the 'site' of the work - both the website or display and the tactile materials on which the work is operated - creating in relation to the reading what Roberto Simanowski terms a 'semiotic body'. The fourth chapter takes into consideration the role of the reader's body in Annie Abrahams' 'Séparation' and Xavier Malbreil's 'Livre des Morts'. The fifth chapter explores gesture as a mode of reading and reinscription in the online, interactive works of Serge Bouchardon. Finally, the sixth chapter looks at mobile application narratives, spampoetry and email art, offering ways of reading the new spatialities these forms generate. The work as a whole aims to offer some perspectives for considering digital literatures as capable of creating complex spatial experiences between work and text.
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Kaplin, David. "The best policy : lying and national identity in Victorian and French novels /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3202897.
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Dicks, Joseph. "A comparative study of the acquisition of French verb tense and aspect in early, middle, and late French immersion." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6736.
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In the present thesis, the interlanguage development of second language acquisition (SLA) was examined as it relates to students' French verb tense use in three program variants of French immersion: early French immersion (EFI), middle French immersion (MFI) and late French immersion (LFI). Verb tense is a crucial element of the French language and an area of considerable difficulty for students in French immersion (FI). The age at which the learners were first exposed to intensive amounts of French varied in each of these programs--5 years of age (Kindergarten) in the earliest starting program, EFI, 9 years (grade 4) in MFI, and 11 years (grade 6) in the latest starting program, LFI. Fourteen separate FI classes were studied: eight at grade 6 and six at grade 8. There were two classes per program at each grade level with the exception of grade 6 MFI where all four classes were involved. A major goal of this thesis was to study the issue of 'starting age' in SLA as it applies to intensive exposure to the second language (L2) in a school setting. Those who favour an early start argue that the larger number of cumulative hours of exposure to the L2 coupled with a 'natural process' of language acquisition produce better results. Those who prefer a later start claim that a 'natural process' of SLA need not be limited to younger learners, and that the older learner's advanced cognitive ability and first language literacy skills result in more rapid and efficient language learning. In general, the results of this research indicated that, regarding students use of basic French verb tenses, all three French immersion (FI) programs were working effectively as reflected in the superior performance by grade 8 students in all three programs on both tests. On the more analytic, written task two groups of later-starting students appeared to make fairly quick progress in some casesby the end of grade 6), and performed at a level which was closer to their earlier starting peers. Learner factors such as starting age (i.e., cognitive maturity and first language literacy), and second language fluency seem to interact with different pedagogical techniques to produce results which advantage late starting learners on more analytic tasks. Finally, the interlanguage analyses provided evidence that the passe compose and imparfait aspects of the written French past tense are extremely difficult for students in French immersion. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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Ashaolu, Olubunmi Oludolapo. "Representation of sub-Saharan Africa in contemporary French literature and film /." For electronic version search Digital dissertations database. Restricted to UC campuses. Access is free to UC campus dissertations, 2005. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.
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Sutherland, Nina Alice. "The representations of the Harkis in French media, literature and cinema." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.430575.
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Williams, Alison Jane. "Tricksters and pranksters in medieval and Renaissance French and German literature." Thesis, University of Bristol, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.389342.
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