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The edition examines the manuscripts, history and significant variants of Le Crève-Coeur and of 'La Rime en 1940'. Aragon's claim that the collection has its origins in World War 1 is considered, but little evidence for this is found. A more likely catalyst is the colonial war in Morocco of 1925-26 that led to Aragon's conversion to Communism. It is in the 1930s that the poet develops his strategy of poetry as a 'contrebande' against war. The principal influences on Aragon in this undertaking are evoked. A survey is given of the political and historical circumstances of Le Crève-Coeur, and they are shown to be indivisible from the poetry. The main themes of the collection are considered and the degree to which the 'contrebande' technique affects their accessibility. A detailed discussion of 'La Rime en 1940' and of each poem, stanza by stanza, follows.

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This thesis examines the attitudes to wealth as depicted in two contrasting literary genres: didactic verse sermons and courtly verse romances. A preliminary chapter briefly outlines the historical background, its relationship with contemporary literature and with the prominence of wealth as a literary theme. Part One, devoted to the didactic works, begins with an appraisal of the sources of the Old French attitudes to wealth, and of their mode of expression. Consideration follows of the treatment of avarice in medieval verse sermons. Thereafter the relationship between man and wealth is studied from two standpoints. Firstly man is viewed as a moral type, usually the evil rich man. Chapters Three and Four resume the opinions of the didactic poets on wealth and on man as a social type in all his different roles. Part Two, centred upon the courtly works, examines avarice as a literary topic, and goes on to consider the more dominant theme of courtly liberality. This leads to a careful analysis of the gift theme wherein are demonstrated the complexity and significance of giving and accepting gifts in courtly romance. A critical survey of attitudes to wealth embraces also attitudes towards poverty, and a study of the ways of amassing wealth includes the approved courtly remedies for poverty. Wealth is overshadowed only by the theme of love in the romances. Accordingly the thesis ends with a study of the conflicting attitudes to wealth in relation to love found in courtly society and in its heroes. The General Conclusion assesses how far the two literary genres differ and coincide regarding attitudes to wealth, and seeks to establish why.

This thesis intends to explore colonial fictions written in French and set in the former Belgian Congo between 1945 and 1960. The investigation will focus on George Duncan (1898-1967), Henri Cornélus (1913-1983), Marcel Tinel (1904-?) and Joseph Esser (1901-?). The thesis - throughout - will endeavour to focus on both ethics and poetics. In order to achieve this overarching (double) objective it will attempt to address the following questions: (1) how are colonised subjects and colonisers represented by this fictional material? (2) how do colonial novelists account for and/or sympathise with the emergence of a Congolese opposition after the Second World War? (3) what are the implicit and explicit strategies deployed by the corpus to support or question the discourse(s) on which Belgian colonialism was premised? (4) what is colonial imagination? Did it decolonise itself - and if so how? - with the demise of the Belgian empire in 1960? In its poet(h)ical investigation this thesis will rely (a) on a range of representatives of postcolonial thinking such as Sartre, Fanon, Mouralis, Glissant and Mudimbe, (b) as well as a number of literary critics whose work is of relevance for my study. Chapter I will contextualise the thesis from both a critical and an historical standpoint and fall into four distinct parts. Part i will provide a historical overview of the Congo under Belgian rule. Part ii will concentrate on Belgian colonial discourse with a particular emphasis on its main ideologue, Pierre Ryckmans (1891-1959). Part iii will deal with the two colonial art and literary critics Gaston-Denys Périer (1879-1963) and Joseph-Marie Jadot (1886-1967) and their attempt to (a) promote colonial writing and (b) create synergies between 'white' and 'black' literatures at a time (1945-60) which coincided with the emergence of the first Congolese writers in French under the auspices of the journal La Voix du Congolais. Part iv will focus on the reassessment of Belgian colonial literature by contemporary critics. Chapters II to V will be author-based. In each case a central text will be read with / against a number of other primary sources. Chapter II will deal with Duncan's five colonial novels and their recurring main protagonist with a particular emphasis on Blancs et Noirs (1949). Chapter III will read Cornélus' novel Kufa (1954) against his collection of short stories Bakonji. Les Chefs, (1955). Whereas Duncan's and Cornélus' fictions primarily concentrate on white male subjects for whom Central Africa is a mere theatrical backdrop meant to be metaphorically mirroring the decline of Western civilisation, Tinel and Esser give their preferences to Congolese protagonists and engage more deeply with local cultures. Chapter IV will attempt to interpret Tinel's novel Le Monde de Nzakomba (1959) in the light of (a) Tinet's journalistic pieces on the colonial situation and (b) with regard to 'négritude', one of the underlying themes of the novel. In Chapter V the reading will focus on Esser's novel Matuli, fille d'Afrique (1960). As for Tinel, the interpretation will also rely on Esser's non fictional writing, the bulk of which is dealing with bantou culture. The conclusion of the thesis will propose a paradigmatic categorisation of the Belgian colonial corpus during the given period.

The poems of the Old French Cycle des Narbonnais are highly concerned with touch, paying close attention to who touches whom first in greetings, who is authorised to perform certain symbolic touches and, reading violence as a radical version of touch, whose touch is victorious in battle. Modern sociologists suggest that touching follows lines of social prestige; however, by employing a performative approach to identity, overlaid with a psychoanalytic interpretation of the subject’s relationship with the Other, I argue that regulated patterns of touch in the poems iterate and maintain heroic identity. Of course, an identity forged in this way is problematic, for touch both creates and erases the difference upon which performative identity depends, and I argue that violence erupts as a result of this paradox. By thus linking touch, violence and identity, I ask questions about the nature of violence itself, making this a relevant study in a world that is getting out of touch, yet is riven by violent conflict. I demonstrate that within the community of knights with which the poems concern themselves, there is a shared language of touch that creates bonds between those men, excluding those who are ineligible: women, peasants, children and Saracens. The ritualised public touch of the dubbing ceremony marks the knight’s entry into this community, and announces his willingness to kill its enemies. Now his prowess, honour and self-worth – his heroic identity – will be figured through his ability to destroy outsiders whilst remaining inviolate. His violent touching of the Other is a means to safeguard his own body against the Other’s traumatic touch, yet it also necessitates proximity with an enemy that troublingly mirrors his own values and achievements. As anxiety provoked by disintegrating subjective boundaries worsens, violence escalates and knights battle mercilessly, until as one poem describes, ‘de lor sanc cort li ruz contre val’ (‘the river of their blood ran down the valley’, Les Narbonnais, l. 3952).

After a prefatorial note on the literary atmosphere of the time, the first chapter of this thesis outlines the life and literary career of Rene Ghil and indicates his personal relations with Mallarme, Verhaeren, Vlele-Griffin and Stuart Merrill together with his general attitude towards symbolism. The interest is then concentrated on certain of Ghil's works. His first publication La Legende d'Ames et de Sangs which brought him into the literary foreground, is discussed. The next phase of Ghil's development which covered Le Geste Ingenu and ia Traite du Verbe reveals how deeply he was influenced by allarme. The importance of these works among the earliest publications of the Symbolist school is noted. The fourth chapter records the bresk with Mallarme. Le Meilleur Devenir which appeared shortly afterwards is considered as an example of Ghil's scientific poetry. His views on scientific poetry - both as regards material and methods of expression are investigated and Ghil's place among the scientific poets of France is discussed. In the following chapter the introduction into Ghil's poetry of modern industrial life and of the depopulation of the countryside is studied. This theme leads to a comparison with similar aspects of Varhaeren's work. We next survey the strange fascination of the Orient and of Java in particular, which is noticeable in many of Ghfil's writings and in Le Pantoun des Pantoun especially. A chapter on Ghil's attitude towards nature whilst developing points made in previous chapters leads to an examination of Chil's cosmic verse. The last chapter summerises the aspects of Ghil's verse and indicates his importance in the literature of his time. Ghil's influence, often transitory in the development of the writers concerned, is found to fall into three main periods and to spread to many countries point of comparison between Poe and Ghil are noted in an Appendix. The question of the colouration of vowels, and of English translations of some of Ghil's poems form the subject of other Appendices.

Accounts of French medieval verse have always supposed that there was no readily identifiable general theory of poetry in the Middle Ages. At most, it is accepted that there were arts of versification (the Latin Poetrie of the XII/XIII centuries, the French Arts de Seconde Rhetorique of the XVth century), which covered points of grammar, rather than of "theory" as the term is usually understood. However, there were non-literary theories which were systematically used by certain medieval poets. They derived from Greco-Arabic, rather than Latin, learning. The most unstable of these were theories concerning the relationship of mind and body - in sleep, in semi-wakefulness and in melancholy. Encyclopedists and men of learning began to relate poetry to the sciences of the quadrivium in Late Antiquity (Augustine, Boethius). This tendency became increasingly clear in the XII/XIII centuries, at the same time as the diffusion of texts like the Avicenna Canon of Medicine and the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata. Jean de Meun was the first French author to relate the new sciences to poetic expression on an important scale. His discoveries were exploited by a number of poets in the XIV/XV centuries. The first major poets to use an art of poetry (that is, an ars poetica, rather than an ars versificatoria) and to apply its lessons to their work were Chastelain and Francois Villon. Their use of Averroes's commentary on Aristotle - the Poetria Aristotelis - has gone unnoticed. Towards the end of the fifteenth century French poetry evolved away from its interest in science in the direction of a number of ill-defined aims. Some of these were moralizing, others appear to be concerned with pure technique. Almost none of the poetry then written attempted to imitate the qualities of classical verse. It was concerned with problems of formal expression, rather than with exploring the structure of the mind or of the universe, as previously.

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