In the late twentieth century, it is assumed in literary circles that texts cannot reveal that truth of the autobiographical subject. At the same time, the increasing prominence of identity politics in society and academe brings demands to discover the truth about the lives of people whose experiences are not represented in the histories of canonical figures with canonical lifestyles. This urgent desire to discover the truth about the experiences of outsiders to the establishment (a description applicable to the writers I treat in depth here, who are variously Jewish, homosexual, foreign, female and criminal) leads to readers making demands for truth that literary writers no longer feel able to deliver. Focusing on the autobiographical writings of Nathalie Sarraute, Georges Perec, Jean Genet and Helene Cixous, my thesis explores in particular the reader's contribution towards the self-image that the author crafts. I hypothesize that the genre of autobiography is characterized by manipulativeness on the part of the author, who encourages readers down specific paths in order to coerce them into accepting a certain model of how autobiographical subjects may be represented in texts. This thesis studies difficulties that writers encounter in relating their selfhoods to readers: one of these is the problem of promoting an appropriate and ethical stance on the part of the reader towards the autobiographical subject. Awareness of this problem informs writing strategies, and thus my research leads me to investigate relations not only between author and reader, but also attitudes towards 'writing the self', and in particular towards the autobiographical genre. The thesis considers scholarly understandings of what autobiography is in Chapter One, before moving on to study Sarraute's self-writing in Chapter Two, the work of Perec in Chapter Three, texts by Genet in Chapter Four, and finally certain of Cixous's recent works in Chapter Five.

Per Nykrog says that 'the point of view of the Old French fabliaux is identical to that of courtly literature'. This Dissertation sets this opinion beside the blatant uncourtliness found in certain fabliaux, and argues that their Courtliness is Neocourtliness. A.D. Mikhailov observes that the uncourtly are not confined to one class or type, but are those who show <I>une sécheresse de coeur </I>and <I>un froid esprit calculateur. </I>The courtly are therefore those who show the opposite traits, but traditionally they do so <I>à mesure. </I>In the selected fabliaux, the characters acts with passion and emotional excess, privileging freedom and imagination above morality and <I>mesure. </I>These ideas cannot fit comfortably with Courtliness. The characters are victims of other people's narrow-mindedness, imposed through the stories told about them, but they reclaim their lives by taking over these stories. Specifically, they appropriate Latin and vernacular texts to create rôles within the story (Part 1 of the Dissertation), or, by deliberate twisting of words, exaggerate the stories told about them to the point of absurdity (Part 2). The new story becomes a vehicle for the characters' freedom. The imagery of the <I>Song of Songs </I>is used for similar purposes (Part 3), and a version of Scholastic logic is used to structure plots (Part 4). These abuses of 'venerated texts' as <I>enabling texts </I>take these fabliaux very far from Courtliness as traditionally understood, into Neocourtliness. Their libertine attitudes, together with the intellectual demands they make, suggest they arose from a free-thinking tendency within a clerkly milieu. This judgement made, many traits of courtly literature, such as those shown by Iseut and Perceval, can be seen retrospectively as neocourtly. I conclude that, as a genre, neocourtly writings can be seen as analogous to today's Postmodern criticism.

This thesis explores conceptions of the cosmic, the human, and the divine in two poetic works: the <i>Sepmaine </i>(1578), a natural philosophical and religious poem, and the <i>Délie </i>(1544), a collection of love lyric. It examines in particular notions of the relationships of similarity, difference and causality between the cosmic, the human, and the divine. Secondly, the thesis also investigates one aspect of the relationship between ‘literary’ texts and philosophical thinking: the specificities of <i>imagistic </i>poetry in representations of the cosmos. The thesis argues that images – which imply a <i>similarity </i>between, for example, the cosmic and the human – are of crucial importance for a sixteenth-century mentality which considers that the <i>similarities </i>between the human, the cosmic, and the divine may be <i>real. </i>Such similarities can be ‘thought through’ in images: images explore the extent to which two domains are similar or different, as well as the nature and implications of these similarities. Common sixteenth-century images thus represent part of the ‘thinking tools’ of a particular mentality. The <i>Délie </i>and the <i>Sepmaine </i>employ two very pronounced poetic styles which present such images in unusual ways; this thesis argues that, as a result, cosmic conceptions fundamental to a certain mentality can be configured differently. In order to discern the specificities of imagistic poetry in relation to the cosmos, the <i>Délie </i>and the <i>Sepmaine </i>are compared with other, non-poetic, texts including Neoplatonist prose discourses on love, Calvin’s depictions of man and his relation to the divine, and various representations of the body politic. Close readings serve to analyse the ways in which images present dominant cosmic notions. The thesis focuses on two images which were omnipresent in many sixteenth-century discourses: firstly, the interactions of the four elements depicted as human love and hatred; secondly, the effects of the beloved lady upon the lover depicted as the effects of the sun or the divine upon the earth.

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Throughout the work of Anne Hebert and Suzanne Jacob, the lost child appears in man guises, and in many settings, from the surreal and grotesque to the contemporary and realistic. This thesis examines the child's place within the narrative structures of three novels by each writer. It explores the relationship between maternal subjectivity and the emergence of the child's voice, in order to address the link between this often conflictual relationship and the production of narrative itself, and to compare each writer's depiction of the association between the production of narrative and the production of children. The novels examined in this thesis feature reluctant mothers, or women whose maternal status is uncertain, and who are contingently, equivocally maternal. However, a number of these ostensibly maternal attributes can also be ascribed to narrators, who are also portrayed as contingent, reluctant, or ambivalent, and whose authority is uncertain. The narrator's uncertainty and contingency are reflected in the formal properties of these works, whose narratives are fragmented and whose narrative focalization is unstable, divided between multiple points of view. Maternity and the presence of children are frequently implicated in this splitting, and narrative and maternity are presented in conflict and competition. Moreover, the difficulties inherent in the production of narrative, the fragmentation, burial, of narrative are linked to the liminal, ghostly or equivocal presence of a child. In unravelling the various textual relationships between the production of children and the production of narrative, the thesis examines the ways in which the concealment of, or search for, a child shapes and directs each of the novels, resulting in a body of writing that is both provocative and unsettling.

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I take as the subject of my thesis poems attributed to the troubadours, Marcabru, Arnaut Daniel and Raimbaut d’Aurenga. However, rather than study the texts as they are (re-) presented by the modern editions, I return to their attestations within the manuscripts which have participated in their transmission. For whilst the edition generally prints a single text, suggestive of an authorial original, the manuscripts transmit multiple, interrelated versions. Focusing on the manuscript variations (<i>variance</i>) in terms of a sedimentation of text with corresponding text, I instead construct a simultaneity of manuscript readings as caught in moments of incessant permutation and difference. Not only are our notions of the author, the original and the unique thus denied, but the written remnants of the language defy our expectations of coherence, consistency and the discrete. The implicit contrast between the manuscript text as plurality and excess and its reduction to single within the edition, at once sets up a dynamic of ‘outside’, or ‘other’, in relation to traditional notions of textuality. Yet it is from within the space of the manuscript pages themselves, through the varying interplay of grapheme and gap, that I would begin to suggest a ‘beyond’: a representation of the unrepresentable. As source of discomfort an subject to repression, a materiality which cannot be adequately circumscribed, it is the body which eludes the structures of language. My work is thus informed by its conceptualisation in modern theory, whereby Kristeva’s reworking of psychoanalytic theory produces an expression of the bodily abject. Moving away from Kristeva, however, from a poetics of fracture and glimpses of bodily feminine (Marcabru), from a bodily landscape of abjection (Arnaut Daniel), with the last chapter, on Raimbaut d’Aurenga, the body is at once evoked through significations of skin, and erased. An in its displacement as border and exteriority, we are left with an interlacing of gaps. As I thus draw together minute philological argument with theorisations of the body, my work may be seen as an implicit answer to <i>écriture féminine</i> with its ‘writing on the body’. In place of its overturning of syntactic structures in a celebration of the bodily, however, mine is a writing of a disrupted and disruptive layering of graphies: and a suggestion of a bodying beyond.

This doctoral thesis is the first comprehensive work on Martinican women’s literature. I demonstrate that Martinican women authors have been just as prolific as their male counterparts and have increasingly contributed significant social criticism from a specifically female perspective. The aim is to rectify the imbalance in the attention given to women writers from Guadeloupe and those from Martinique, and to remedy the disproportion of critical studies dedicated to male Martinican writers compared to those by their female counterparts. The thesis provides a general overview of Martinican women authors and focuses on Nicole Cage-Florentiny, Suzanne Dracius, Fabienne Kanor, Marie Flore-Pelage and Audrey Pulvar in particular. These five authors belong to a generation of writers who are less concerned with revolutionary and ideological manifestos, but with the specific problems with which women are confronted on a daily basis. What is thereby generated is a canon of Martinican women’s literature, or French Antillean literature more generally, that can be situated in its own context, rather than assimilated into African-American, Third-World or Francophone African literary canons. They break silences on taboo subjects, putting into the forefront rape, incest, madness, miscegenation, silencing, exile, dysfunctional relationships and lesbianism, and present distinctively female experiences of racism, sexism, and class elitism. My analysis shows these authors establish new forms of resistance against patriarch oppression, not only in their approaches to representing women’s subjugation, but also in how they appropriate, subvert, and reject available Western literary techniques. They situate the root of their society’s problems in the time of slavery and colonialism, and insist that changes need to be made today, thereby incorporating an awareness of their past yet maintaining a new and all-inclusive femi-humanism. Their female aesthetic and shift away from male-centred beliefs, portrayals and stereotypes and towards a new understanding of the position of women as mothers, sisters, wives, lovers, and as authors of their own subjectivities, is a much-needed component in a complete and critical literary representation of Martinican society.