Traditionnellement perçu comme expression de la politique impériale de Marguerite d’Autriche, régente des Pays-Bas, dans le duché de Savoie dont elle était douairière en Bresse, le couvent Saint-Nicolas de Tolentin à Brou monumentalise en fait la dévotion de son défunt époux Philibert II. Le souverain avait hérité des derniers ducs de la branche aînée son inclination ignorée pour l’influente congrégation observante des Augustins de Lombardie qui participant de la création renaissante, fournit, transcrit dans un style local, le schéma claustral de Brou. L’idée maîtresse de Marguerite fut le prestige de la Renaissance, découverte au dôme Saint-Jean de Turin. A l’encontre des lectures erronées du XIXe siècle, la princesse ne s’inspira pas de Champmol. Pour son italianisme, elle confia les tombeaux et l’église au français Perréal. Seules des impossibilités pratiques l’amenèrent à recruter fin 1512 le bruxellois van Boghem. Son art et son réseau brabançons accompagnaient le tropisme ibérique de la cour de Bourgogne mais dès 1524-25, il insuffla à Brou les touches maniéristes que permettait la pénétration de la Renaissance aux Pays-Bas, plus tardive qu’en France. Le programme de l’église sotériologique emphatise la piété du duc et à un second rang, celle de la maison de Marguerite, mais aussi les devoirs du regnum, que Philibert et sa veuve exercèrent dans des pays distincts : ils culminent dans l’exercice de la justice dont le modèle est le Christ du Jugement dernier qui jadis, figurait sur le vitrail nord du transept de Brou. Marguerite signa l’œuvre : promouvant l’échange compassionnel, elle incitait autant à la conversion de chacun qu’à la prière d’intercession et à la mémoire, par-delà les siècles, de l’archiduchesse dont la naissance d’exception, impériale, avait engagé la vie et le monument d’exception. / Instead of expressing, as it is traditionally regarded, the imperial politics in Savoy of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, the convent Saint Nicolas of Tolentino in Brou she erected in her dower of Bresse embodies the devotion of her late husband Philibert II, duke of Savoy. The sovereign had received from the last dukes of the eldest branch that unrecognized inclination towards the soaring observant congregation of the Austin Friars of Lombardia, which joined the Renaissance and provided the claustral scheme of Brou. Margaret’s main idée was the search of the Renaissance she had discovered through the Duomo San Giovanni of Torino. Against the incorrect readings of the XIXth century, she was not inspired by Champmol. She entrusted the graves and the church of Brou to the Italianizing French artist Perréal, and only practical impediments prompted her to sign on van Boghem at the end of 1512. His brabantine Gothic’s practice and circle accorded to the Spanish tropism of the burgundian court but around 1524-1525, the arrival of the Renaissance in the Netherlands allowed him to bring mannerist accents. The iconology of Brou reveals its soteriological aim. It magnifies the duke’s devotion and at a second rank, the one of Margaret’s house, but also the duties of the regnum that Philibert and his widow both practiced in different countries. Their acme is the ministry of Justice whose reference is the Christ of the Last Judgment, which once figured on the lost northern glass window of the transept. Margaret signed the work: ruled by a will of compassion and exchange, it induced anyone both to the conversion for one’s own salvation, to intercede for the princes, and to remind through ages the memory of the archduchess, whose exceptional imperial birth had involved her unique life and memorial.

The zombie narrative has seen an increasing trend towards the emergence of a zombie sentience. The intention of this thesis is to examine the cultural framework that has informed the contemporary figure of the zombie, with specific attention directed towards the role of the thinking, conscious or sentient zombie. This examination will include an exploration of the zombie’s folkloric origin, prior to the naming of the figure in 1819, as well as the Haitian appropriation and reproduction of the figure as a representation of Haitian identity. The destructive nature of the zombie, this thesis argues, sees itself intrinsically linked to the notion of apocalypse; however, through a consideration of Frank Kermode’s A Sense of an Ending, the second chapter of this thesis will propose that the zombie need not represent an apocalypse that brings devastation upon humanity, but rather one that functions to alter perceptions of ‘humanity’ itself. The third chapter of this thesis explores the use of the term “braaaaiiinnss” as the epitomised zombie voice in the figure’s development as an effective threat within zombie-themed videogames. The use of an epitomised zombie voice, I argue, results in the potential for the embodiment of a zombie subject. Chapter Four explores the development of this embodied zombie subject through the introduction of the Zombie Memoire narrative and examines the figure as a representation of Agamben’s Homo Sacer or ‘bare life’: though often configured as a non-sacrificial object that can be annihilated without sacrifice and consequence, the zombie, I argue, is also paradoxically inscribed in a different, Girardian economy of death that renders it as the scapegoat to the construction of a sense of the ‘human’. The final chapter of this thesis argues that both the traditional zombie and the sentient zombie function within the realm of a posthuman potentiality, one that, to varying degrees of success, attempts to progress past the restrictive binaries constructed within the overruling discourse of humanism. In conclusion, this thesis argues that while the zombie, both traditional and sentient, attempts to propose a necessary move towards a posthuman universalism, this move can only be considered if the ‘us’ of humanism embraces the potential of its own alterity.

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The project aims to develop a corpus of the 14th century marble sculptures in Brescia, Mantua and Cremona. After mapping the materials localized in these territories, which was made possible thanks to the inventories of the respective Superintendencies and Dioceses, as well as the bibliography, it was possible to collect a large number of testimonies. The resulting archival investigation allowed to refine the research on the history of the pieces, to update and correct the data already reported in bibliography and to investigate unpublished works. From a methodological point of view it was considered appropriate to proceed with the stylistic analysis of the sculptures in parallel with the identification of contexts, origins, authors, models and influences. This made it possible to identify and deepen a critical chapter, the history of Gothic sculpture in this part of Lombardy, which until a few decades ago was rather neglected by studies. The development of a catalog, divided into territorial sections, aims to be an easy reference tool for scholars of Italian sculpture. Several unpublished works have emerged in Brescia and in its province. Some hypotheses have been advanced about the path of the sculptor Delaido da Lodi, active in 1301 in Gargnano, and about the artworks in and from Brescia realized by the Master of Sant’Anastasia. The Mantua area, which returned the most significant results, was analyzed from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the eve of the dalle Masegne season. During this period of time, various artists, mainly from Venice, were active in the city. Among them, the sculptor Andrea da San Felice, the anonymous artist baptized here with the name of "Maestro di Piero Maser" and Antonio da Mestre. Some of the sculptures collected can be related to Lombard artists such as the "Maestro di Viboldone", to whom a new sculpture is attributed, and Guido Frisoni, an artist mentioned in some documents preserved in the State Archive of Mantua, to whom it is now possible to trace the "Madonna with Child" in Grazie di Curtatone, thanks to the interpretation of the epigraph placed at the base. The Cremona area closes the catalogue, which stands out for the quality of the surviving works, at the expense of quantity. The famous reliefs preserved in the church of San Bassiano in Pizzighettone are exemplary of the formal refinement of the survivals of this territory. / Il progetto si è posto l'obiettivo di elaborare un corpus delle sculture del XIV secolo in marmo conservate nelle province di Brescia, Mantova e Cremona. Grazie all’iniziale mappatura dei materiali nei singoli territori, realizzata passando in rassegna gli inventari delle rispettive Soprintendenze e Diocesi, oltre alla bibliografia, è stato possibile raccogliere un cospicuo numero di testimonianze. La conseguente indagine archivistica ha consentito di perfezionare le ricerche sulla storia conservativa dei singoli pezzi, di aggiornare e correggere i dati già segnalati in bibliografia e di indagare sugli inediti. A ciò si è aggiunta l’analisi stilistica delle sculture, che è avvenuta parallelamente all’individuazione di contesti, provenienze, autori, modelli ed influenze. Ciò ha permesso di individuare e fare il punto su un capitolo critico, la storia della scultura gotica in questi territori della Lombardia, che fino a pochi decenni fa era poco frequentato dagli studi. Numerosi sono, inoltre, gli spunti di ricerca emersi per il futuro. Per questo motivo è stato elaborato un catalogo, che ha l’obiettivo di essere uno strumento di agile consultazione per gli studiosi di scultura italiana. Sono emerse diverse opere inedite nel bresciano, su cui si è cercato di far luce. Alcune ipotesi sono state avanzate circa il percorso dello scultore Delaido da Lodi, attivo nel 1301 a Gargnano, e riguardo alle testimonianze bresciane del Maestro di Sant’Anastasia. Il territorio mantovano, che ha restituito i risultati più significativi, è stato analizzato dagli esordi del Trecento fino alla vigilia della stagione dei dalle Masegne. Durante questo lasso di tempo furono attivi in città diversi artisti, principalmente provenienti da Venezia, su cui ora è possibile ragionare. Tra essi emergono lo scultore Andrea da San Felice, l'anonimo artista battezzato in questa sede con il nome di "Maestro di Piero Maser" e Antonio da Mestre. Di origine lombarda furono invece il Maestro delle sculture di Viboldone, a cui in questa sede è attribuita una nuova opera, e Guido Frisoni da Como, artista citato in alcuni documenti conservati a Mantova, in Archivio di Stato, a cui è ora possibile ricondurre la 'Madonna con Bambino' di Grazie di Curtatone grazie all'interpretazione dell'epigrafe posta alla base dell'opera. Chiude il lavoro il territorio di Cremona, che si distingue per la qualità delle opere superstiti, a discapito della quantità. Esemplificativi della ricercatezza formale delle sopravvivenze di questo territorio sono i celebri rilievi che si conservano nella chiesa di San Bassiano a Pizzighettone.

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This study examines how themes, conventions and concepts in Gothic discourses are remediated or developed in selected works of contemporary interactive fiction. These works, which are wholly text-based and proceed via command line input from a player, include Nevermore, by Nate Cull (2000), Anchorhead, by Michael S. Gentry (1998), Madam Spider’s Web, by Sara Dee (2006) and Slouching Towards Bedlam, by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto (2003). The interactive fictions are examined using a media-specific, in-depth analytical approach. Gothic fiction explores the threats which profoundly challenge narrative subjects, and so may be described as concerned with epistemological, ideological and ontological boundaries. In the interactive fictions these boundaries are explored dually through the player’s traversal (that is, progress through a work) and the narrative(s) produced as a result of that traversal. The first three works in this study explore the vulnerabilities related to conceptions of human subjectivity. As an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” Nevermore, examined in chapter one, is a work in which self-reflexivity extends to the remediated use of the Gothic conventions of ‘the unspeakable’ and ‘live burial’ which function in Poe’s poem. In chapter two, postmodern indeterminacy, especially with regard to the tensions between spaces and subjective boundaries, is apparent in the means through which the trope of the labyrinth is redesigned in Anchorhead, a work loosely based on H. P. Lovecraft’s terror fiction. In the fragmented narratives produced via traversal of Madam Spider’s Web, considered in chapter three, the player character’s self-fragmentation, indicated by the poetics of the uncanny as well as of the Gothic-grotesque, illustrates a destabilized conception of the human subject which reveals a hidden monster within, both for the player character and the player. Finally, traversal of Slouching Towards Bedlam, analyzed in chapter four, produces a series of narratives which function in a postmodern, recursive fashion to implicate the player in the viral infection which threatens the decidedly posthuman player character. This viral entity is metaphorically linked to Bram Stoker’s vampire, Dracula. As it is the only work in the study to present a conception of posthuman subjectivity, Slouching Towards Bedlam more specifically aligns with the subgenre ‘cybergothic,’ and provides an illuminating contrast to the other three interactive fictions. In the order in which I examine them, these works exemplify a postmodern development of the Gothic which increasingly marries fictional indeterminacy to explicit formal effects, both during interaction and in the narratives produced.

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This study examines the relation between gender and genre in four novels that chart the development of American domestic life from the Colonial to the Gilded Age. In these novels, the presence in the house of women--mothers, daughters, sisters, servants, slaves--often threatens the fathers' dynastic ambitions and subverts the formal intentions of the narrative. These women represent familiar but strange forces of the uncanny which lurk beneath the apparently placid surface of domestic narrative. In "house" novels by Hawthorne, Stowe, Alcott, and James, interactions of the uncanny feminine with dynastic concerns threaten not only the novel's social message of destiny and dynasty, but the traditional form of the novel itself. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne constructs a narrative in which patrician fathers and domestic daughters struggle for control of the House and its story. Slavery disrupts domestic life in Uncle Tom's Cabin, inverting and thereby perverting traditional notions of home and family and producing monstrous mothers and failed households. Alcott details the abuses and dangers of reified gender roles in family life, while depicting a young woman's attempt to reconstruct domesticity as a female community in Work. Finally, James displaces domestic concerns entirely from The Other House, portraying instead the violent nature of feminine desire unrestrained by tradition, community, or family. Story and telling work at cross-purposes in these novels, creating a tension between Romantic structures and realistic narrative strategies. These authors depart from the tropes of their times, using gothic devices to reveal monstrous mothers, uncanny children, and failed or fallen houses within the apparently conservative domestic novel. Such gothic devices transcend literary historians' distinctions of romance and sentimental fiction as respectively male and female stories and reveal the fundamentally subversive nature of domestic fiction. For these writers, the uncanny presence of the feminine produces a counternarrative of gender, class, and race, redefines the cultural boundaries of home and family, and exposes the fictive nature of social constructions of gender and domesticity.