Masculinist constructions of Algerian history relegate women to symbolic roles. The texts by Algerian women writers studied in my thesis all use fiction to express agency and create empowerment through – or in spite of – these symbolic positions. My thesis is concerned with how fiction highlights and negotiates various manifestations of the tension created when authors engage with masculinist historical discourses by casting women in – and so perhaps validating – the roles that they are assigned within these same discourses. Chapter one defines what I am terming 'masculinist history' by analysing historical documents. Chapter two examines how, in Assia Djebar's La Femme sans sépulture, Leïla Marouane's La Jeune Fille et la Mère, and Maïssa Bey's Entendez-vous dans les montagnes ..., real-life freedom-fighters are fictionalised in a way that negotiates the tension between filling in the blanks of history and upholding discourses of martyrdom. The third chapter explores the more recent violence in Algeria, how Bey's Puisque mon coeur est mort and Marouane's Le Châtiment des hypocrites employ fiction to create sites of mourning that are otherwise unavailable because of the amnesty for crimes committed during this period – although the violent conclusions of the texts imply the limitations of fiction in this respect. Chapter four moves away from representations of women caught up in extraordinary circumstances and focuses on the everyday. This chapter investigates the figuration of the domestic as a site of female resistance to both patriarchal and colonial oppression – a figuration that simultaneously risks reinforcing women's symbolic position as bastions of tradition – in Djebar's Nulle part dans la maison de mon père and Bey's Bleu blanc vert. Finally, the fifth chapter inspects how Ahlam Mosteghanemi's Chaos of the Senses reconfigures her earlier fictional work in a way that spotlights female agency, and how Malika Mokeddem's autobiographical La Transe des insoumis does something similar, but in a much more personal way. Across the thesis I therefore conceptualise a history/fiction entre-deux that is not so much a space of emancipation as it is multiple spaces that allow for an exploration of agency within traditional – and often oppressive – female roles.

This thesis challenges the general critique regarding the work of the Goncourt brothers. Under researched until recently, their paradoxical position as aristocrats in the society of the second part of 19th-Century France as well as literary men, authors of multi-layered novels, made them difficult to frame. However, in recent years, their work has been mainly studied through a stylistic approach, the particularity of their 'style artiste' given as a symptom of the morbidity inhabiting them as individuals. Here, we propose to analyse the nine principal novels of the two brothers and subsequently of Edmond de Goncourt on his own (after the death of Jules, the younger brother in 1870) from the theoretical angle developed in Michel Foucault's works: Histoire de la folie al'age c1assique (1961), Archeologie du savoir (1969), Histoire de la sexualite (1976), Surveil/er et punir (1975). I have drawn on the Foucauldian concept that modern power created new forms of sexuality by inventing discourses about it through the medicalisation of women's sexuality during the nineteenth century. Women as subjects of the sexually-based disorder of hysteria were constituted and controlled by hierarchical observation and normalizing judgments of the medical discourse. The Goncourt brothers, at first, through the symptomatic elaboration of hysteria and/or neurosis which constitutes their characters' lives, seem to adhere to the discourse of power that the modern sciences 'of medicine convey in bourgeois society. This study seeks to resolve what lies beneath the medical discourse found in the Goncourt's work. and more specifically, the way the two authors chose to use their own medical knowledge to express their view as to how society tackles the issues of ab-normality and otherness. While they are thought to be largely conservative, a thorough reading of their texts shows a fracture in their representation of the medical discourse: it emerges that the two main figures the Goncourts consider to be suffering the most from society's dominant discourse are those of the artist, but also, more unexpectedly, those of women and their sexuality. Not only do they denounce the pressure society puts on the individual but they contest its repression which condemns them to death.

The inter-war years in France were the scene of a prolonged and often violent debate over the form society should take and the rights of conflicting social groups. Within this general atmosphere of controversy the dispute over the role of woman often goes unrecognised, though in fact it emerges continually in the Press and literature of the period, both as a specific political problem (the fight for the enfranchisement of women) and as an element in the overall ideological conflict. The purpose of this study will be to examine the situation of women during those years, and especially to examine the interpretation of women's role in contemporary fiction. The relationship between social reality and literary image will inevitably be a central concern, though the 'reality' of women's position must be understood not only in terms of events and facts, but in terms of a complex formation of ideas, representations and attitudes which govern the practical behaviour of the sexes in a given society. In other words, the notion of 'image', taken here to signify a manner of seeing, a particular conception, will be applied not only in the treatment of literature but also in that of society. The first section of the thesis will attempt to establish, largely by reference to the Press and contemporary publications, the predominance of certain collective images of woman, the second to relate these to the images that emerge from the novels of several contemporary authors. This relationship is inevitably a complex one.

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Child abuse began to emerge as a central topic depicted in Western children’s and teenage realist fiction from around the 1990s, peaking in prevalence around the turn of the century and into the early years of the twenty-first century. In this thesis I explore the formal expression of abuse and trauma in a corpus of twenty French texts published between 1992 and 2008 for young-adolescent readers aged between 10 and 16 years. The project begins with a Propp-inspired structural model of child-abuse plot features and characters, which identifies a set cast of protagonists across the corpus which serve a specific functional role in the narrative. I then focus on the three main narratological categories of voice, mood and time, using Genette’s Discours du récit as a framework for a close reading of the abuse texts, whilst also drawing upon various trauma theorists, to explore how choice of narrator, focalizing character and temporal perspectives are manipulated to express different aspects of and perspectives on abuse and the psychological impact of abuse in particular. The final chapter is an analysis of the means used by both protagonists within the texts, and the authors of the texts, to communicate and express abuse and trauma on a personal level, to other characters, and to readers. By drawing upon structural and narratological studies as well as trauma theory in my analysis, I show that form and content are inextricably linked across the corpus. Indeed, the protagonists’ traumatic memories and painful experiences are expressed both on a diegetic level via the characters, and also reflected in the formal and structural features of the texts.