Our ways of thinking modernism and its legacy are imprinted with the pattern of an opposition, a struggle between two sets of extremes: objective and subjective; form and feeling; mechanistic and organic; mind and body; knowing and being; self and world; aesthetic and historical. The three writers whose work I explore in this thesis challenge prevailing notions of this oppositional discourse. Entering the scene of modernism late in its history, Elizabeth Bowen, Eudora Welty and Maurice Merleau- Ponty develop a new kind of vision that makes us rethink the relationships between perceiver and perceived, between mind, body and world. All three writers undertake a fundamental reorganisation of the relationships between internal consciousness and external things through the narration of a perception that is outside the limits of discrete sensations or causal relationships. Physical things are neither pure objecthood nor merely external triggers for the ramblings of a solipsistic consciousness, rather they infringe on a consciousness whose own edges are indistinct. This writing establishes an interdependent and interlocutory relationship between subject and world, which become not opposite ends of a perceptual scale, but aspects of a common flesh. The intimate connection to the world is both comforting and threatening, both reinforcing subjectivity and de-centring it. The re-ordering of the connections between self and world leads to a reassessment of collective identity and historical agency, as well as impacting upon approaches to modes of representation. In trying to express the pre-linguistic experience of embodied consciousness, this writing looks to models of mute expression found in visual images. Exploring how the invisible aspects of experience emerge within the visible realm, the writing takes on an often hallucinatory or uncanny character. Charting the passage from being to doing, from perception to creation, from the style of the flesh to the style of fiction, Merleau-Ponty, Welty and Bowen dissolve received boundaries and distinctions at every level.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1988. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves [401]-411.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 2000. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-259).

The Victorian need to compartmentalise and define women’s sexuality in terms of opposing binaries was paralleled by the vague idea that the period’s French and British literatures were at odds with one another. Elucidating the deep connections between, and common concerns shared by, French Naturalist and Realist and British New Woman authors, this thesis shatters the dichotomies that attempted to structure and define women’s sexuality in the mid- to late- nineteenth century. The thesis focusses on novels and short stories by French authors Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, and New Woman authors Sarah Grand, Ménie Muriel Dowie and Vernon Lee. In a time during which the feminist movement was gaining momentum, and female sexuality was placed at the heart of a range of discourses, and scrutinised from a number of different angles – not only in literature, but in medicine, psychology, sexology, criminology – the consideration of the female sexual self and her subjectivity brings together the work of authors whose oeuvres have been largely considered as antithetical. Previous work has indeed shown the centrality of female sexuality to both literatures, yet never compared them. This thesis rediscovers the significance of both literatures’ investment in a discourse revolving around female sexuality by contrasting the French male authors with the British female writers, and uncovering unexpected parallels in their claims about the contemporary situation of women. Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe’s feminist philosophy frames the thesis’s comparative analysis, questioning and re-examining these authors’ representations of female sexuality. The ideas of sensuality and rationality, motherhood, reproduction, marriage, and prostitution thus become recurring concerns throughout it. The thesis’s first chapter considers the female as sexual subject and/or object of the male gaze, in a range of New Woman and French literature. The second and third chapters are organised around the themes of marriage and prostitution, and the final chapter considers issues of female sexuality within the fantastic short story.

This thesis explores the influence of French royal image-making on English monarchies at the turn of the eighteenth century. It investigates the relevance of Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) to English royal iconography during the reigns of William III (r. 1689-1702) and Queen Anne (r. 1702-1714) across a wide range of source material - from panegyric and portraiture, to medals, sculpture, and architecture. In doing so, it foregrounds the intricate interplay between political communication and different forms of artistic imagination in the early modern period. The thesis conceptualises the relation between post-revolutionary English monarchical image-making and its French counterpart as one of contest with and emancipation from French influence. The specific political circumstances add a particular poignancy to the investigation of this narrative, as the almost continual crises which the English monarchy suffered at the time stand in sharp contrast with the (dynastic) stability of the French monarchy and its highly influential court culture. Despite these elements of rupture and contrast, however, the story of seventeenth-century English monarchical image-making is one of continuity in respect of its gradual disengagement from the French model. In contrast to his immediate predecessors, I contend, William's image-making presents him as Louis's competitor, rather than his imitator. In the course of William's reign, Louis's monarchical model thus turns from model to foil. This development evolves further in Queen Anne's reign, culminating in Louis's mort avant la lettre, as Anne's image-making dispenses with the Ludovican model both as model and as foil. English post-revolutionary image-making, I argue, not only mirrored, but actively contributed to the decline of the Ludovican model, whilst maintaining the figure of the monarch as central to public political discourse. Through the lens of monarchical image-making, therefore, this thesis offers a critical outlook onto late seventeenth-century Anglo-French political and artistic relations.