What is generally referred to as the Nouveau Roman, or New Novel, made its appearance in France in the early 1950s. As the name implies, the New Novel claimed to be new, that is, to break away from what one must call, for lack of a better term, the traditional novel. The New Novel aroused considerable interest in France and abroad; literary critics, journalists, and the New Novelists themselves, were soon airing their views on the subject. Passionate and prolonged discussions ensued. It is this Debate which we propose to investigate. For this purpose, we shall limit ourselves to five authors: Alain Robbe-Crillet, Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget -, and to the years: 1954--1964. Our study is divided into three main sections. In Part I, we have indicated the reasons underlying the limitations imposed on the scope of the thesis, that is, why we confined ourselves to the examination of the role played in the Debate by only five specific authors, and why we chose to investigate only the years 1954--1964. In conjunction with a study of the aims of the New Novel as propounded by the New Novelists themselves, a survey is made of the writers, French and foreign, whom the New Novelists themselves claim as their precursors. For the study of the actual Debate, both a chronological and a thematic approach is adopted. In Part II, the chronological approach - imposed by the historical nature of the subject - will enable us to examine the immediate reactions of the press to the New Novels on their publication and to the authors of these novels. In Part III, the thematic approach will enable us to proceed to a critical evaluation of the principal arguments thrown up by the Debate. In view of the nature of the subject, our documentation for this thesis is derived primarily from a close examination of the literary periodicals and journals of the period. In addition, we have analysed both the theoretical writings by the New Novelists and interviews they have given to the press. We have also used original material in the shape of interviews given to us at a later date (February-March 1973) by the five New Novelists on whom we have based our study and by the two Critics who played a major role in the Debate on the New Novel: Roland Barthes and Maurice Nadeau.

La Fontaine's literary and intellectual evolution is characterized by a hesitant and conscientious exploring of side-tracks which require to be analysed in order to appreciate the complex realities behind the poet s literary creation. His life which spanned three quarters of a century is divided in this study into six broad stages, corresponding more or less to the major events and influences on his career: childhood education, the search for literary models, the creation of intellectual poetry, the approach to maturity, intellectual maturity, old age and decline. These stages are considered as a series of intellectual experiences culminating in the formation of La Fontaine's personality as a literary artist and an epicurean moralist. The poet became an intellectual after undergoing various experiences from the world around him. His curious and eclectic temperament made him highly susceptible to all sorts of influences as well as kept his mind constantly on the move, from one literary genre to another, from literature to philosophy, philosophy to science, science to history and thence back to literature. This intellectual mobility drew inspiration from various sources, both ancient and modern, to which La Fontaine was exposed. Thus the formation of his mind and art owes a lot to the complex and interacting influences of such ancient writers and thinkers as Plato, Homer, Epicurus, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid, Apuleius, Virgil, Seneca, and nearer home, Montaigne, Marot, Malherbe, Gassendi, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz and others. La Fontaine took something from each of these thinkers for the building of his own intellectual personality. It mattered little to him whether their influences were of the past or of his own generation; he submitted to them in his own particular manner so long as they represented his ideal and conception of life. La Fontaine was generously endowed with the innate powers of imagination, observation and sensitivity which, coupled with his amiable disposition, won him numerous admirers, friends and influential patrons who aided his intellectual growth. This growth, the subject of our study, is reflected in the mature reaction of the poet's particular genius to the problems posed by his age.

In this study I will be analysing the way in which the contraries that Beckett calls habit and spontaneity are used in the fictions he wrote in English. In his discursive writings Beckett comments on human experience generally and on the experience of artists particularly in terms of these contraries. I will show that they can be seen as applicable to the people who populate Beckett's early fictions, and thus as illuminating the meaning of those fictions.

Previous comparative and parallel ‘genetic criticisms’ of Flaubert and Proust have ignored the different historical underpinnings that circumscribe the act of writing. This work examines the logos of Flaubert and Proust’s work. I examine the historical specificity of A la recherche du temps perdu, in respect of the gender inflections and class-struggles of the Third French Republic. I also put forward a poetics of Flaubertian history relative to L’Education sentimentale. His historical sense and changes in historiographic methodologies all obliged Flaubert to think history differently. Flaubert problematises both history and psychology, as his characterisations repeatedly show an interrupted duality. This characterization is explicated using René Girard’s theories of psychology, action theory and mediation. Metonymic substitution perpetually prevents the satisfaction of desire and turns life into a series of failures. Mediation is taken further in Proust, and characters are sacrificed to preserve the harmony of the salon. Culture is composed not only of logos but of mythos as well: Poetry, Art, History and Religion are all analysed in this study. Flaubert’s works enact a repeated invocation and repression of the visual, most evident in the Tentation de Saint Antoine, where the symbol is occluded and the logos is lost, whilst Proust’s itinerary as a writer involves resurrecting the soul of John Ruskin and culminates in his protagonist’s initiation into the Arts. Proust culminates a series of attempts since the Realists to analyse the predicament of post-revolutionary Man. The works of the two authors show a flight from the exterior world to one of interiority, but there is no solace to be had in either Flaubert’s world of the logos or Proust’s of the mythos.

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In recent years the name of Gustave Guiches has begun to appear more frequently in the pages of works dedicated to the great writers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It seems, therefore, appropriate that the work of this gifted and versatile writer who enjoyed considerable success and esteem in his life-time, should be made better known.

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One of the central critical problems about Beckett - how can we praise without feeling uneasy the work of an artist for whom "to be an artist is to fail"? - parallels the creative predicament of a writer whose "art of failure" can only exist in an inherently expressive medium. How can an art which is anti-art remain true to itself? Is a truly self-annihilating expression possible? Two perspectives on the problem are opened. The first is theoretical: a consideration of the Duthuit Dialogues confirms that Beckett refuses to countenance an art which survives by making artistic failure itself the occasion of artistic creation. Rather he "dreams" of a genuine "art of failure": without occasion, in-expressive and indefinable. The second perspective (itself suggested by Beckett's critical tendency in the Duthuit Dialogues) is literary-historical: pertinent Romantic, nineteenth-century and Modernist attitudes towards artistic failure are outlined and briefly considered. Such a consideration serves both to define the particular (and unique) nature of Beckett's response to what may be seen as a traditional Romantic and Modernist problem, and to confirm the essentially ontological nature of what Beckett sees as the creative "obligation". (Failure to create as failure to be.) The Beckettian creative predicament is thus considered next in terms of individual identity, by way of the recurring motif of the "imperfect birth", and the paradoxical quality of Beckett's response to his creative problem is most clearly seen in the theatre, where he needs to represent degrees of ontological absence in what has been seen as the medium of "presence". Studies of the individual plays show that Beckett's method is to exploit the essence of theatre, which is playing, so as to suggest that the players are never really present, only playing, because obliged to play, over the void of (their own) identity. In order to render the creative-ontological situation of the imperfectly born subject, Beckett seeks to produce, both in the text and the stage-picture and by a precise counterpointing of the two elements, the effect of parody presence. Examination of the plays in chronological order illustrates a development towards abstraction and an increasing emphasis on shape and pattern. The central character becomes more and more obviously a creator and (by the same token) is revealed more and more clearly by the effect of parody presence as a created being, though imperfectly created. Thus theatrical presence is undermined and the Beckett play enacts its own self-annihilation.

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