Descriptions of food are very prominent in Barbara Pym's twelve novels. They are used on one hand for purely comic purposes. But more significantly, they evolve into a language with a structure and set of rules. To expose the language of food inherent in Pym's fiction, I have employed a combination of social history, structural anthropology and semiology. Roland Barthes' application of structural linguistics to food, and his concern with its' symbolic nature hold particular bearing to this study. The language of food functions on three interrelated levels in Pym: a social level where groups are defined and hierarchised; a gendered level where the sexes are defined and differentiated; and a more personal level where an individual either communes or alienates him/herself from a given group. Identity, whether national, social, sexual or individual, is confirmed in relation to eating habits and roles surrounding food preparation and consumption. With the help of complex strategies of irony, Pym uses the language of food to signal an interest in social and gender reform by presenting the artificiality of social constructs and gender stereotypes.

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Neither a great man nor a great writer, Henri Barbusse aspired to greatness in the sincerity of his convictions, the ambition of his experiments, the constancy of his commitment. A youthful revolt against convention, the impact of the Dreyfus affair, the traumatic experience of trench warfare in the First World War left Barbusse a disillusioned pacifist and a social rebel. The inadequacies of the Allied peace settlement and the example of the successful revolution in Russia led him to espouse the Communist cause as the only movement adhering in deed as well as word to goals of social equity and peace. As critic of capitalist injustice and imperialist adventure, as a leader of the anti-Fascist movement, as theorist of proletarian literature, as experimental artist, he remained loyal to that cause for the rest of his life. An early prototype of the committed intellectual, Barbusse attempted to reconcile his aesthetic principles and moral values with the exigencies of political activism.

This dissertation focuses on the issue of hybridity in Marguerite Duras' corpus of Indochinese texts, as well as on the meeting of identities in the colonial realm. In order to identify the problematics of colonial coexistence, we will address the themes of the encounter between the Orient and the Occident, the use of hybrid discourse and the role of memory in the process of rewriting. Edward Said's Orientalism theory as well as Homi Bhabha's concept of ambivalence in colonial discourse will serve as the basis for the analysis of the Indochinese cycle. Far from being a totalizing experience, hybridity will reveal itself as being a harrowing dichotomy.

This study participates in a tendency of Rabelaisian criticism to consider the Pantagruelian text as a weaving of borrowed forms which rcho surrounding discourses. On thrse grounds, we argue that epideictic rloquence, which comprises praise and blame, forms up a network of recognisable passages. This corpus, which, frora the Gargantua to the Quart Livre, brings together pieces eclectic as much in claim as in structure, is tackled from a generic perspective and analysed in light of their common rhetorical components: dispositio, elocutio and inventio. In accordance with the aesthetic of imitation, which informs the making of texts in the Renaissance, Rabelais recasts models available from his predecessors. However, these textual reshufflings, whether it be a matter of early XVIth Century literary compositions or rehabilitated classical works, is effected through parody. But while the re-evaluation through laughter, in the cases of the Gargantua and the Pantagruel, concerns the occasional poetry of the rhetoriqueurs, parody is brought about within the genre itself in the Tiers and Quart Livres, which comprise paradoxical encomia only. Our interest here is in the modes of parody and the conditions for the provoking of laughter in which can be seen the will to reinvigorate a genre, which had by then become strictly codified. From the first two books to the last a certain way of thinking is being established. With conceptual space allowing such great breadth, the paradoxical encomium introduces into epideictic rhetoric contradiction and equivocation, thereby freeing that genre from its formal constraints. This propensity to paradox is significant for the rhetoric of praise and the textual representation of man. And yet, it is through the parody of the epideictic genre and the often grotesque figures it engenders, that Rabelais participates in the oratory genre, - an anthropology indeed, and, as such, a tool to conceive of man - which conveys the highest conception of the human.

This Master's thesis is comprised of two sections. The first one, entitled "Pontus de Tyard et les voies musicales", analyses the representation of music in two of sixteenth century French writer's " Dialogues philosophiques". Indeed, in his work, music is personified by a woman, Pasithee. Through an examination of three different aspects of the relationship between music and writing, we will attempt to grasp the mysterious link between the "Solitaire" and his muse, incarnation of music and of poetic inspiration. / The second section, "Fugue a trois voix silencieuses ", a tale in which three female characters express their "voices", as defined by the rules of harmony established by Johann Sebastian Bach, is a literary transposition of the fugue form. The fugue is a musical form in which the contrapuntal structure includes several voices that blend with and reply to each other. Similarly to a canon, the parts seem to chase within a repeated motif. The literary transposition of the fugue form was fascinating to us. Our story follows the literary tradition which draws its strength from the encounter of music and writing.

Neglected by traditional literary histories or misrepresented in gender-specific criticism, Eliza Haywood is properly a novelist whose innovations can be seen in the works of Defoe and Richardson. This thesis examines selected novels by the London-based Haywood (1693?-1756) in light of their contributions to the novel form. It begins by considering her romance novellas as adaptations of the popular scandal novels of Delariviere Manley. Haywood's early fiction combines the concerns of amatory fiction with the political expediencies of satire. Over the course of her career, Haywood's early romance novellas expanded to become conduct novels. In their endorsement of a prudent conjugal happiness over erotic fulfilment, her later works exemplify the changing proprieties at the heart of the eighteenth-century British novel. The argument of this thesis is the contention that Haywood's prose fiction provides a fresh and significant perspective upon a pivotal period in eighteenth-century British fiction.

The choice of subject for a history painting, long considered motivated by dramatic considerations, appears to be also, in the light of numerous documents, the expression of the painter's craft. The following study will attempt to demonstrate this aspect in the oeuvre of Jacques-Louis David and, in particular, in The Oath of the Horatii.

This thesis identifies Diderot's criticism of idealism in his novels and stories concerning three aspects: metaphysics, morals and psychology. The conclusions of this study are the following: religions has, in Diderot's opinion, more negative than positive effects; myths and superstitions prevent the search for truth; fatalism cannot be accepted as a valid philosophic theory; traditional morals and its concept of virtue go against human nature and produce moral "idiotisms"; judicial system creates crimes where nature did not; "anti-natural" morals requires humans to adopt utopic ideal attitudes the effect of which is to mentally unbalance them and lead them to debauchery; the morals prescribed by idealism leads to social hypocrisy; human cannot keep irrevocable promises dictated by institutionalised idealism. Diderot, therefore, favours a new ethic based on real human behavior.