This project explores the writing of grief within women's narratives of loss. It is concerned with the question, "How does one honour, in grief, all that up-rises? And how then does one write of it?" (Gail Jones 149). In Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, she laments the absence of any significant body of literature that will help her through her grief. I propose that the grief memoir-a term new enough not to have been included in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's 52 genres of life narratives (in Reading Autobiography)-fills this gap left by professional literature of bereavement and itself contributes to "that weeping constellation" (Jones 147) or community of mourners missing from contemporary grief practices as identified by Sandra Gilbert and Darian Leader. This genre, new to literary analysis, provides fertile ground for the discussion of recent literary and psychoanalytic analyses of mourning that have resisted the neat split Freud draws between normal and pathological grief. My chosen texts deliberately complicate "packaged and frozen" (Ellmann qtd. in Payne et al. 78) notions of recovery while honouring what Jenny Diski calls the "texture of experience" (Skating 185). I'm essentially identifying a sub-genre of the grief memoir which I call "memoirs of textured recovery." What sets them apart is the performance of complex "recovered" selves that show how "recovery," ambiguous and shifting in nature, calls for more complicated theories of mourning able to accommodate an understanding of grief not in terms of Freud's absolute recovery nor Tennyson's "loss forever new" (qtd. in Krasner 226), but rather, a space located somewhere in between. In their refusal to conform to the compensatory paradigms of the grief memoir, these texts contribute to "a dialogue of mournings" (Leader 85) and encourage us to think in a new ways about loss.

Cette thèse s’attache à étudier l’image politique de Margaret Thatcher à travers des caractéristiques personnelles telles son parcours, ses idées, sa présentation physique, ses postures politiques ou encore les stratégies de communication dont elle fit usage. L’objectif est de mettre en lumière les différents éléments mis en avant par Margaret Thatcher et par les canaux de diffusion d’image, principalement constitués des médias et de son entourage politique. En ce qui concerne le bornage temporel, l’étude tient compte des quarante années qui s’écoulèrent entre la première candidature de Margaret Thatcher à une élection, pour la circonscription de Dartford en 1950, et la fin de son dernier mandat de Premier ministre en 1990. Cette thèse présente également l’intérêt de porter sur une période qui vit de nombreuses techniques de communication politique se développer : les conseillers en communication vinrent à jouer un rôle prépondérant. / The main ambition of this PhD thesis is to provide a study of Margaret Thatcher’s political image through the lens of various personal characteristics like her experience, ideas, physical presentation, political postures or the communication strategies she relied on. The objective is to emphasize the different elements put forward by Margaret Thatcher and by the image transmission channels, notably the media and her political circle. The period studied encompasses the forty years that went by between the first time Margaret Thatcher stood for election, for the Dartford constituency in 1950, until the end of her last Prime Ministerial mandate in 1990. This PhD thesis also has the advantage of focusing on a period of time during which many political communication techniques developed while communication advisers came to play a predominant role.