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During the annee terrible (1870-71), the sight and the sound of shattering glass became a daily reality, as the Prussian bombardment and the Commune fires wreaked havoc upon the Paris population. The French capital had been flooded with glass during Haussmannisation as a symbol of France's modernity, but now glass became inextricable from personal and national trauma. This thesis explores the distressing freight of meaning which was gained by glass during the crisis years of 1870-71, and its manifestations in Emile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), Guy de Maupassant's Contes et nouvelles (those published 1870-89), and loris-Karl Huysmans's A Rebours (1884). This study begins with a cultural-historical study of the destruction and representations of glass during the Tenible Year; despite the ephemeral qualities of glass, it came to harbour distressing memories - and furthermore, in a time of Naturalism and Impressionism, describing and painting the city without incorporating these memories became impossible. I then explore three different literary reactions to the burden of traumatic symbolism acquired by glass. First, I discuss how Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames stages a conflict between the counterpoised glassworlds of the visual and the aural. The resolution of this conflict creates a utopian, phalanstery-based society in which glass and literature are instrumental in moving beyond the traumatic past. Maupassant's Contes et nouvelles take an antithetical approach. They force the contemporaneous reader to acknowledge the traumatic memories associated with glass, before finally triggering a moment of catharsis. This thesis goes on to demonstrate how elements of both Zolian utopia and Maupassantian dystopia feed into J.-K. Huysmans's often parodic A Rebours, and how Huysmans uses glass to divorce bourgeois aesthetics from the literary, and from Decadent values in patiicular. Although these three authors differ considerably in their specific treatments of glass, I argue that their works reveal a deeper need to move beyond the physical world of bourgeois culture at the end of the nineteenth century; their strategies of subversion and transformation trace a trajectory towards Art Nouveau and other artistic elaborations of glass in the early twentieth century.

This PhD thesis uses close textual analysis to examine the presentation of examples to women in two French Renaissance short prose narrative collections. It explores and contrasts the way that moral and illustrative examples are presented by a male- and female-authored text. Extending earlier scholarship, I argue that female exemplarity is not identical to or symmetrical to male exemplarity, but has its own models and means of propagating them. Furthermore, the sex of the author, the sex of the reader and genre are all significant factors in female exemplarity. The thesis is divided into six chapters; two of which serve as introduction to female exemplarity in each of the texts and the remaining four examine key aspects of it in both texts. Chapters One and Two discuss female exemplarity in each of the works, taking into account factors such as the dedications of the texts, the address to the female reader, the composition of the readership and issues relating to gender and genre. Chapter Three focuses on truth and history, which are essential conditions for storytelling in both of the collections. In the <I>Histoires tragiques,</I> these notions are clearly shown to be male-dominated concerns that consistently exclude women, which strongly contrasts to the representation of the female protagonist as false. I compare this to Marguerite de Navarre's distancing of ancient history and overt questioning of the value of truth. In the <I>Heptaméron,</I> truth is rarely established outright and this subverting of convention is consistent with the work's atypically in other respects. Memory is ever-present in female exemplarity, and in Chapter Four I demonstrate that Boaistuau and Belleforest represent memory as a fixed and static site, which is accessible to both (male) reader and (male) author and frequently works to contain and control the female protagonist. In the <I>Heptaméron,</I> on the other hand, the representation of the text as orally transmitted, the omnipresence of <I>oubly</I> (forgetting) and the use of images which can change and evolve liberates memory from male tradition and highlights the potential for women's contribution to it.

Chivalry and Christianity were fundamental to both medieval society and its textual production of romance and epic. However, historical accounts of chivalry often argue that by the sixteenth century the military and social role of the knight had changed, and tournaments and chivalric honours had become mere pageantry. Meanwhile, Christianity was also undergoing upheaval as the Reformation and wars of religion split French society over religious theology and over the service that the knight owed his king or his faith. This thesis studies representations of chivalry and Christianity, and the changing relations between them, in the sixteenth-century French version of <i>Amadis de Gaule</i>, a twenty-one volume best-selling series translated from Spanish and Italian sources. This best-selling romance was produced from 1540 until 1582 in France and attracted many readers and critics. The first three chapters analyse different aspects of chivalry and Christianity. First, the use of clandestine marriage in the series (a practice legislated upon by both Henri II and the Council of Trent) brings out tensions between marriage sanctioned by God and that sanctioned by noble families. Secondly, the use of occult sciences for prophecy, enchantment and divine revelation is typical of medieval romance but suspicious in the age of the witch-crazes. Finally, the knight in the series becomes increasingly well educated (as the contemporary noble was advised to do), but this eloquence can decrease his heroic status, perhaps turning him from a noble ideal inspired by God into a linguistic model for the <i>noblesse de robe.</i> The final chapter is a case study of changing forms of chivalry and Christianity in a single book of the <i>Amadis</i> series. The chapter examines the incorporation of Jacques Amyot’s translation of the <i>Histoire Æthiopique </i>into Book 20 of <i>Amadis. </i>Amyot is fascinated by the <i>in medias res</i> structure of this text and by the narrative tension that it creates. However, his romance is set in a pagan world and its hero is weak. In the adaptation of the same plot in <i>Amadis</i>, by contrast, chivalric and Christian ideals are prominent and the <i>in medias res</i> structure is removed.

This dissertation focuses on French discursive prose at the end of the Renaissance (1595-1640). This is a tumultuous period in French history, which re-defines the signification of nation, language, and identity. The uncertain peace after the Wars of Religion makes the climate eager for stability but nevertheless somewhat suspicious and wary. The humanist practice of <I>imitatio </I>- the creation of new texts throughout the imitation of other texts - is interrogated along with concerns of plagiarism, authorial responsibility and attribution: the writing subject and their relationship to the wider community are put into question. Bound up in all of this is a growing and urgent concern - even an obsession - with calumny, injury to reputation. It is on calumny, this growing concern and responses to it in discursive prose, that this dissertation focuses. The reactions to calumny in this period could indeed be classified as obsessive: there is a marked increase in the number and virulence of tracts and treatises devoted to this subject. Calumny is viewed as performative: it is never 'simply' a statement; in the enunciation, something is <I>performed</I>. Consequently, the law required a similarly performative punishment: those found guilty of calumny were forced to recant in public places, before being exiled or, frequently, put to death. I consider the consequences of the vulnerability to language that discourse on calumny reveals. In much writing on calumny, words can indeed inflict harm, and in this way have a very real power. During this period, there is a change in theories of what language is, and how it works; the power of language to model conceptualisation is increasingly emphasised. Calumny poses a real threat to the individual constituted in language and in society: in a very real way, it can endanger, and even destroy, the subject - calumny is frequently figured in the period as murder. The calumniator is often represented as an impostor, an unlocatable and slippery agent; but the victim of calumny, equally, <I>loses their place </I>in their community.

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