This thesis examines some aspects of the French writer Emile Zola's transmission in late-Victorian literary. culture. In suggesting that the translation of his fiction into English was not o~y linguistic, but cultural, the introduction argues that the commonly-used terms influence and reception do not adequately describe the transformative character of contemporary sex 'education. The thesis concludes by looking at some twentieth- and twenty-first-century instances of Zola's transmission in England. Zola's transmission in England. The first chapter uses evidence of English stage adaptations of L'Assommoir to argue that this transmission in England took place earlier and more widely than is commonly believed. The second chapter uses two case studies - a forgotten serialisation of Therese Raquin, and George Moore's novel Esther Waters - to suggest that Zola's influence on English fiction was refracted through the demands of publishing norms but also through the aesthetic aims of late-Victorian novelists. The third chapter looks at the debate 'surrounding Henry Vizetelly's translations of Zola's novels, arguing that the controversy both emerged from and contributed to the deepening division between mass and elite readerships in late nineteenth-century England after the 1870 Education Act. The final chapter uses the Vizetelly affair as a context in which to read Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, suggesting that the New Woman novel appropriated Zola in order to highlight the inadequacy of

The object of the thesis is to present a comparison between two authors, Jacques Attali and Michael Ende, showing how their literary endeavours construct a discourse on the mythical heritage of mankind, the power of the imagination and the centrality of storytelling in human existence. With La vie eternelle, roman and Die unendliche Geschichte, respectively, Attali and Ende have created two literary works whose scope embraces mythology, metaJiterary devices and an approach to the literary motifs of the double, the mirror and eternal return. The frrst chapter, «Metafictional Worlds", focuses on the metafictionai aspects of La vie elernelle, roman and Die unendliche Geschichte. The second chapter, "The Symbology of Names", analyses AttaJi 's usage of names in his novel. The third chapter, ''The Compendium of Symbols", presents a comparative analysis of the two novels. The fourth chapter, "Archetypes, the Double and the Mirror", looks at La vie eternelle, roman and Die unendliche Geschichte from a different perspective. Their symbols of renewal and cyclicality, their portrayal of time and ritual and their peculiar geography invite an Eliadian reading. Eliade's concepts of "eternal return", "archaic ontology" and the "abolition of profane time" are used to analyse the worlds created by Attali and Ende. The second part of the chapter focuses on the motif of the double and the mirror, looking at the duplications, mirrors, and alter-egos of the two novels.

This thesis is an attempt to define Zola's concept of animality and the way it is elaborated in his written works. Zola's animal metaphors are more concerned to convey a meaning than a visual impression, thereby disconcerting those who expect a more colourful and anecdotal treatment of animal imagery. Didactic may mean drab, but we must take the author's general animal comparisons very seriously in the light of his life-long intention to relate man, Metonymically, to all other material phenomena of the cosmos. The main animality idea that permeates Zola's literary endeavour is that the relationship between man and other animals is fundamentally wrong and in urgent need of improvement. Sections on anthropamorphism and animalization pinpoint the various problems, and suggest tentative solutions. It is only by the adoption of a new, biological morality, however, than man, nature's deviant species, can attain greater harmony and self-knowledge. Individualism must be sacrificed to the survival prospects of the collectivity, viewed over the long term. Man's social state and natural state will then reflect one another in the true Darwinian sense, and no longer encourage grisly parodies of the "struggle for life" ethic.

This study of Scandinavian and French crime fictions covers a fifty-year period from 1965 to 2015, during which both Scandinavian and French societies have undergone significant transformations. Crime fictions in the respective contexts have responded in terms of their content and approach to these shifting social realities, which in turn have played a part in transforming the generic codes and conventions of the crime novel. At the centre of the analysis are the two distinctive social models which these crime fiction traditions have as their points de repère: the French model of republican universalism and the Scandinavian welfare state, both routinely described as being in a state of crisis around the end of the twentieth century.     The study establishes that early engaged crime fiction approaches these models from a class perspective, whereas at least since the 1990s group identity displaces socioeconomic interests as the critical focus. The thesis, then, adopting a comparative approach, investigates the interplay between contemporary Scandinavian and French crime narratives, considering their engagement with the relationship between the state and the citizen, and notably with identity issues (class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity in particular). An underlying premise for the project is an understanding of crime fiction as a multi-dimensional research object. Accordingly, alongside its literary analyses, the thesis places its twelve textual case studies within a wider interdisciplinary and intertextual framework where crime novels are viewed as socio-historical chronicles, as potential vehicles for social critique and as sites where various forms of identity are negotiated. The comparative analyses undertaken reveal that the discussion of identity issues is of a far more radical and subversive nature in the French crime fiction tradition than in its Scandinavian counterpart, corresponding also to more radical rewritings in France of the generic crime fiction template. Further, the study concludes, whereas the Scandinavian engaged crime novel engages affirmatively with the social consensus, the French variant has - in its dealing with the more rigid social model of French universalism - a transgressive and transformative approach.

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This thesis uses the palimpsest as an interpretative lens through which to consider various rewritings of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris. The corpus date range reflects the extent of the mystères urbains phenomenon, from 1842, when serial publication of Sue’s novel began, to 1905, when serialization of Jules Lermina’s Mystère-ville was completed, and after which the mystères tended to adopt new settings and new preoccupations. Chapters I and II provide introduction and contextualization. Chapter III analyses the paratextual matter used to ‘package’ the texts, specifically prefaces, footnotes and illustrations. Chapter IV considers issues of identity, namely the emergence of the detective character, the role played by secret societies, and the implications of rewriting gender roles. Chapter V deals with geographical and temporal transpositions and Chapter VI compares feuilleton and book versions, as well as examining theatre adaptations and parodies. By way of conclusion, Chapter VII underlines the enduring relevance of the mystères urbains, as well as suggesting avenues for future research. The characteristic common to these rewritings is an insistent self-consciousness. Paratexts impinge on texts and become, in an irreverent parody of their own conventions, complicit in the mystification of the reader. Extra-diegetic phenomena, such as the emergence of the detective character, the rise of an eclectic, indeterminate group of popular readers, and the conflation of reading and writing activities encouraged by the serial form, are reproduced en abyme within the novels. Similarly, geographical and temporal transpositions transcend their diegetic category, repeatedly proving themselves to have a meta-diegetic resonance. American-set mystères reflect the Americanization of culture, while temporal transpositions cultivate confusion between Histoire and histoire. The reader’s attention is deliberately diverted from the mysteries of the cities to the machinations of the text itself. This self-reflexivity is characteristic of literary modernity, but especially prominent in these mystères urbains, where the relationship between text and context is a significant one. The city provides not only the subject matter of the mystères, but also the forum for the production, consumption, reception and rewriting of the texts.

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The final decade of the twentieth century in France saw the emergence of a “new generation” of women writers who offered imaginative renegotiations of corporeal representation. Amongst these newly-created textual bodies, monstrous characters came to populate female-authored stories and presented multiple challenges, disturbing readers and social conventions of physical propriety. In this study, the challenge lies particularly in demonstrating how selected authors have envisaged monstrosity as a means of interrogating changing models of corporeal identity, especially when the subject is undergoing typical physical/psychological transformations of the human lifecycle. Literary and cultural critics have tended to regard the monster either as an insight into people’s perceptions of their time and social context, or as projections of fears and desires of the human psyche. Whilst most of these readings fail to consider both the social and individual domains where the monstrous intersects, I posit that monstrosity is most productively approached as an evocation of rejection of corporeal and behavioural difference, as it becomes visible to others and to the subject him/herself. I therefore combine a psychoanalytical approach (Julia Kristeva) and theories of power structures within social institutions (Michel Foucault) to decipher the resulting complex response of social and self-rejection of the monstrous subject. Focusing on four post-1990 French women writers – Régine Detambel, Louise L. Lambrichs, Lorette Nobécourt, and Amélie Nothomb – I explore how these authors have represented monstrosity in terms of limits and demands which are socially imposed on subjects and which are registered upon and circumscribe the body. These authors’ dual social and individual approach to the monstrous allows me to re-evaluate multiple contemporary anxieties around physical difference and bodily changes and gives monstrosity a new voice. I unveil how the texts analysed here creatively offer new spaces to re-think bodily difference and open up other possibilities for human subjectivity.