À l'exception de Le Confessioni di un italiano, le roman le plus célèbre d'Ippolito Nievo (1831-1861), - et d'une partie de sa production poétique – Le poesie garibaldine- , les œuvres de Nievo sont encore, en grande partie, étudies selon l'image du début du XXe siècle fixée par Dino Mantovani. Le premier biographe de Nievo a voulu relever dans ses œuvres une dimension poétique et esthétique liée au Romantisme, auxquelles s'ajoute un arrière fond politique. Cet portrait a marqué la tendance de la critique italienne à lire et relire Nievo comme l'écrivain qui a donné les plus belles pages de la littérature du Risorgimento, mais, en même temps, qui n'a jamais eu une propre et véritable dimension intellectuelle. Mais, depuis le lancement de l'Edition Nationale de l'Œuvres d'Ippolito Nievo en 2005 à Padoue, cette image a commencé lentement a changer. Il y a eu un revirement critique signalé par la décision de publier comme premiers titres les comédies Pindaro Pulcinella et Le Invasioni moderne, soulignant la volonté d'ouvrir les études aux textes moins connus qui avaient été sacrifiés et, parfois, jamais publies au XXe siècle. Cette approche, donc, a engendré une revalorisation et une redécouverte de toute sa production romanesque, poétique et journalistique. Par conséquence il à été possible pénétrer totalement sa pratique d'écriture. Quant à ce sujet il s'arrive que Nievo avait l'habitude de rédiger en même temps des textes de nature très différente: des poèmes et des roman, des articles et des lettres. Cette pratique a mise à jour la naturelle tendance à abattre les confins entre les genres.Pour ce qui concerne les œuvres théâtrales, dont nous proposons l'édition critique (la comédie I « Beffeggiatori » et les brouillons pour une comédie en vers « Don Giovanni » et un livret d'opéra « Consuelo ») cette absence de confins est encore plus évidente. D'une manière générale on peut affirmer que Nievo n'a jamais regardé au théâtre contemporain, mais il a fondé sa dramaturgie sur des éléments très éloignes entre eux: la tradition goldonienne pour la fonction des personnages par rapport à certaines situations (par exemple la typologie du moquer ou des amoureux), la production romanesque française de Honoré de Balzac, de Stendhal et de George Sand pour la structure des relations entre les personnages et pour le choix des thèmes d'actualité (par exemple la description ironique du pouvoir politique de l'aristocratie). Donc il apparaît aujourd'hui que, même si Nievo n'avait jamais quitte l'Italie, sa dimension existentielle et intellectuelle était complètement européenne. Il s'agit d'une double identité littéraire et nationale ambiguë, qui dénoue très clairement la complexité de l'écrivain italien. / For a long time Ippolito Nievo’s (1831-1861) theatrical production was considered less important than his work of narrative and was considered as “juvenile work”. On the contrary, during the last ten years of the Nineteenth century, it was reconsidered and it brought to the discovery of several comic texts, such as Le Invasioni Moderne and Il Pindaro Pulcinella, which have showed Nievo’s cleverness in writing plays for the theatre.The edition of the last unpublished production, which is presented in this essay, completes and broadens the studies done on Nievo’s theatre, at the same time, opening several doors for a possible reconsideration of some critical points of Nievo’s literary aesthetics. From the study of the unpublished texts produced before Le Confessioni di un Italiano, in fact, Nievo’s dependence on French literature appeared, especially Balzac, Stendhal and George Sand. The setting of I Beffeggiatori –a political comedy which portrays Italy in 1852-1853 – and its study of the characters recalls the Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal, his ironical glance at political happenings told by Balzac and it moves away totally from contemporary comic theatre. Don Giovanni –notes for a comic text in verses- results from Stendhalian considerations on the figure of the Seduttore, considerations which we can find in the De l’Amour and in the short story Les Cenci; but Don Giovanni also results from the whole French post-Byron tradition of the myth. Consuelo – the libretto- reveals a clear and evident Sandian matrix in its plot and allows to formulate a theory on the aesthetic Nievian music, full of Mazzinian considerations, well known to Sand too.The edition of these texts has allowed to reformulate some judgements on the origin of Nievo’s irony, even in L’Afrodisiaco per l’amor platonico and in Lettere a Matilde, underlining a matrix which is decidedly and only French.

This thesis explores the representation of conspiracy in the literature of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its engagement with conspiracy thinking, with particular reference to the work of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and George Sand (1804-1876). In providing the first sustained scholarly exploration of conspiracy and cultural production in nineteenth-century France, it situates the novel within wider discourses on European political history in the years leading up to the upheaval of 1848. Through close readings of Balzac and Sand's common investment in conspiracist modes of explanation, this study makes the case for a new generic category, the novel of conspiracy, around which literary poetics, historical imagination and political fantasy come to coalesce. Chapter one proposes a re-evaluation of the dialectic between models of surface and depth reading in Balzac's Une ténébreuse affaire (1841), arguing that the conspiratorial landscape of this proto-detective novel belies Balzac's fraught relationship to the severed referentiality of his narrative. As illustration of a Balzacian poetics of conspiracy, Une ténébreuse affaire, it is suggested, points forward in literary history towards the Flaubertian aesthetic of platitude. Chapter two looks to the political criticisms Jacques Rancière makes of Sand's patrician benevolence to inform its reading of Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840), which depicts workers' secret societies and the underground networks of Restoration liberalism. Accusations of misguided idealism, this thesis shows, align Rancière's critique and the literary-critical narrative informing Sand's twentieth-century aesthetic devaluation with the reproach that she herself levels at the Carbonarist conspirators of her novel. Chapter three, finally, turns to the alternative origin myth of 1789 that Sand elaborates in Consuelo-La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842-44). Her engagement with the founding text of the conspiracist tradition of explanation, it argues, provides the cornerstone for the interrogation of the tensions of a pre-Revolutionary Europe torn between Enlightenment and Illuminism. Framing the Balzacian and Sandian novel as emblematic of a wider discourse on the conspiratorial origins of 1789 has a two-fold advantage. On an immediate level, it nuances received critical ideas on these authors' relationships to history and literary genre (a realist Balzac incapable of looking back further than the Restoration whose demise he so lamented; an idealist Sand too caught up in a utopian future to envisage the historical past). In doing so, this study seeks to problematize the narrative of oppositionality behind the Balzac-Sand binary in terms of which the literary history of nineteenth-century France is habitually couched. Yet, more significantly, it also gestures towards the importance of the conspiratorial as a prism through which to approach the porosity of the very categories of 'literature' and 'history' in the nineteenth-century French context.

This thesis is concerned with an important persone of the first half of the 19th century, French writer George Sand. The main purpose of the thesis is to reveal whether the writer is one of the key authors of French romanticism in Czech schools and whether the Czech schoolchild has an opportunity to acquaint themselves with her rural novels. The thesis contains a theoretical and a practical part. The practical part briefly mentions her biography, gives an overview of the main periods of her work and is subsequently closely concerned with George Sand's rural novels. Since Sand creates an image of an ideal human being in her rural novels, in our analysis of these novels we focused on the characteristics of the main characters and on the realistic and idealistic elements present in the novels. In the end of the theoretical part we dealt with Sand's influence on Czech writers of the 19th century, especially on Božena Němcová and Karolína Světlá. The practical part is based on a research, which was conducted in selected Czech schools (in Pilsen area and Prague). The aim of this research was, as has been mentioned before, to chart the standing of George Sand in the curriculum of world literature. We found out that Sand no longer ranks among the canonical authors, to whom is the teaching of world...

This thesis explores the themes of Pride and Prejudice in two texts written roughly two hundred years apart. The first work that is analyzed is Elle et Lui by George Sand, published in the year 1859 . The second book that is explored throughout this dissertation is Merci pour ce moment: a best seller penned in 2014 by the ex french Première Dame Valérie Trierweiler. In particular, this thesis takes a closer look at these womens' use of a biography as a means to redeem their image as perceived by the public.

This thesis examines the novels of George Sand (1804-1876) and analyses representative examples from her entire œuvre. Its overall aim is to re-evaluate Sand’s standing as a writer of intellectual interest and importance by demonstrating that she is engaging with a cultural and intellectual phenomenon of particular relevance to the nineteenth century: the link between different ways of seeing and knowledge or understanding, which I term ‘insight’. The visual dimension of Sand’s novels has so far been overlooked or reduced to a rose-tinted view of the world, and my study is the first to examine vision in her work. I argue that Sand demonstrates a continuous commitment to ways of engaging with the world in visual terms, incorporating conceptual seeing, prophetic vision, as well as physical eyesight. Contesting the prevailing critical view of Sand’s œuvre as one which declines into blandness and irrelevance after the 1850s, this thesis uncovers a model of expansion in her writing, as she moves from her focus on the personal in her early novels, privileging internal vision, to wider social concerns in her middle period in which she aims to reconfigure reality, to her final period in which she advocates the physical observation of the natural world. Rejecting the perception of Sand as a writer of sentiment at the expense of thought, this study argues that her writing constitutes a continuous quest for understanding, both of the physical world and the more abstract, eternal ‘vérité’. I show that Sand transcends binary divisions between science and art, the detail and the whole, the material and the abstract, and that she ultimately promotes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the world. This also enables me to reassess Sand’s poetics by arguing that her rejection of the mimetic model is founded on her conception of the world as multiple and constantly evolving.

Historically vilified, the vocalizing woman developed a stereotyped image with the emergence of the prima donna in eighteenth-century opera. By the nineteenth century, the prima donna became the focal point for socio-cultural polemics: women sought financial and social independence through a career on the operatic stage while society attempted to maintain through various means the socio-cultural stability now threatened by women's mobility. The prima donna represented both a positive ideal for women as well as a great threat to western patriarchy. A discourse emerged in which the symbol of female independence and success ”the prima donna" became the site of tactical control and containment. The prima donna stereotype, opera plot and music, and literature all presented the vilified image as a warning of the disaster awaiting women who overstepped the social boundaries established in the patriarchal image of ideal womanhood. Pauline Viardot confronted this attempt at containment by fulfilling society's expectations of her as a woman and simultaneously confounding its presentation of women opera stars. Viardot performed the role of social woman: she married young, she raised a family, she held a salon, and she engaged in other approved social activities. Madame Viardot's acceptance and fulfillment of the roles established for her by her contemporary society provided her a unique freedom within society in which she could maintain a career on the operatic stage without succumbing to the traditional detritus of the popular press, literature or social ostracizing. She crafted her own image rather than allow society to stigmatize or vilify her. Her success was chronicled in contemporary literature written by women who viewed prima donnas as spokespersons for the female plight. Much of this literature explores women's hopelessness and despair in the face of highly restrictive social codes. Prima donnas engaged in a very public career through which they established financial independence, professional success, and an identity literally shaped by their own voices. George Sand briefly explored the artist-woman's search for freedom and independence in her 1833 Lélia, but it was not until Sand met Pauline Viardot that she was able to create a heroine who could gain a respected position in society, enjoy lasting personal happiness, maintain social and financial independence, and who lived to enjoy the fruits of her labor. Consuelo stands as a permanent record of Viardot's impact on her contemporary society. Pauline Viardot successfully revised the image of the prima donna and that of women in the process. Viardot navigated the centuries-old tradition which demonized publicly vocalizing women and created a new image of the woman-artist. An accomplished actress among other things, Viardot successfully performed the roles of social woman, inspiration of a literary heroine, and prima donna. It is her successful negotiation of these roles which allowed her to carve out a unique position in her contemporary society, a position that allowed her to teach at the Paris Conservatory, support the careers of budding male musicians, garner the respect of royalty, publish and perform her own musical compositions, and live a long, fulfilling life. Letters addressed to Viardot, contemporary accounts by male musicians, and her immortalization in Sand's Consuelo all record the new image Viardot created: that of a respected member of society and operatic performer of great artistic and musical genius.

La partie « création » de ce mémoire intitulée Velours Façonné consiste en un recueil de sept contes, incluant un récit-cadre (La ronde des vieillards), racontés par des voix multiples appartenant aux membres d’une Résidence pour personnes âgées visitée par un conteur, Monsieur Doré. Ces contes ont pour thématique un rite de passage de la vie humaine tels que définis par l’ethnologue et folkloriste Arnold van Gennep dans Rites de passage paru en 1909 : l’épreuve de la peur chez l’enfant (Chapeau d’paille, Agathe), le rite initiatique pubertaire (Le Carnet), l’initiation par le voyage (En dormant comme un loir), l’entrée dans la vieillesse (Tarabiscotés) et le deuil (Les voix éclatées). Ces deux fils conducteurs – la figure traditionnelle du conteur et les rites initiatiques – organisent donc les différents types de contes de ce recueil en fonction de temporalités et de personnages diversifiés. Ces récits sont unis par un ton nostalgique et par le désir de donner une voix aux objets et à la nature, soit par un travail sur l’animisme et la miniaturisation. À la manière de George Sand, pour qui le merveilleux et la fiction remettent à l’endroit un monde chaotique et dont l’écriture déclenche « un rite de passage du monde urbain de 1848, déchiré par la violence politique, au monde des campagnes où règne la solidarité » (Lagrave, 2012 : 130), je veux faciliter l’entrée dans un monde imaginaire et penser mes contes comme des récits initiatiques et des rites pour le lecteur. C’est ainsi que j’explore le conte comme rite de passage en soi grâce au narrateur qui fera office, en quelque sorte, de la figure du conteur chez Sand, le Chanvreur. Bien que La Petite Fadette (1849) soit un roman, il est possible d’y retrouver, du point de vue formel et structurel, des emprunts au conte merveilleux. La fin heureuse, digne d’un conte classique, n’exclut qu’un seul des protagonistes : Sylvinet, l’aîné des jumeaux de la famille Barbeau, dont la partie « recherche » de ce mémoire tentera de retracer la trajectoire malheureuse. Les craintes superstitieuses de leurs parents ainsi que les avertissements de la sage-femme du village qui seront ignorés sont autant d’intersignes annonciateurs de la destinée de Sylvinet, de son malheur comme du bonheur de son frère. Proposant « une lecture interprétative de la littérature qui travaille à articuler poétique du texte et ethnologie du symbolique » (Scarpa, 2013), l’ethnocritique me permettra d’envisager les logiques culturelles du texte à partir des rites initiatiques des garçons, qui, pour accéder au monde naturel et social, empruntent la voie des oiseaux (Fabre, 1986). Victime du sort, Sylvinet est également un « personnage liminaire » (Scarpa, 2009; Ménard, 2017), héros négatif et « raté » puisqu’il ne réussira pas son rite de passage vers l’âge adulte et son intégration dans son groupe social. / The “creative writing” portion of this thesis, entitled Velours Façonné consists of a collection of seven tales, including a frame story (La ronde des vieillards), narrated by multiple voices, belonging to the residents of an elderly people home who are visited by a storyteller, Monsieur Doré. These tales share a common theme, that of the rite of passage in a human life, such as it is defined by the ethnologue and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep in his Rites de passage, published in 1909: the test of fear for a child (Chapeau d’paille, Agathe), the initiatory puberty rite (Le Carnet), the initiation through travel (En dormant comme un loir), entering old age (Tarabiscotés) and grief (Les voix éclatées). These two guiding principles – the traditional figure of the storyteller and the initiatory rites – structure the different types of tales of this collection in function of the temporalities of the diversified characters. These stories are united by a nostalgic tone and by the desire to give a voice to objects and to nature, which is attempted by a work of miniaturisation and animism. In George Sand’s style, for whom the marvelous and the fictive turn the chaotic world right side up and whose writing triggers “a rite of passage from the urban world of 1848, torn apart by political violence, to the world of the countryside where solidarity reigns1” (Lagrave, 2012 : 130), I want to facilitate the entry in an imaginary world and think my stories as initiatory in and of themselves and as rites for the reader. That is how I explore the tale as a rite of passage in itself, thanks to a narrator who will act, in a way, as the figure of the storyteller of Sand, the Chanvreur. Although La Petite Fadette (1849) is a novel, it is possible to find in it, from a structural and formal point of view, borrowings for the fairy tale. The happy ending, which would be typical in a fairy tale, excludes only one of the protagonists: Sylvinet, the elder of the twins of the Barbeau family. It is for this character that the “research” portion of this thesis attempts to retrace unfortunate trajectory. The superstitious fears of their parents, as well as the warnings of the village’s midwife, which will be ignored, are premonitory signs (intersigns) announcing both Sylvinet’s destiny and his misfortunes, as well as and his brother’s future happiness and fortunes. Ethnocritisism will allow me to envision the cultural logics of the text from the initiation rites of boys, who, in order to gain access to the natural and social world, take the path of the birds (Fabre, 1986). Victim of fate, Sylvinet is also a “liminary character” (Scarpa, 2009; Ménard, 2017), negative hero and “failed” because his rite of passage is failed and he therefore will not reach adulthood, nor will he integrate with his social group.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the evolution of tales in Europe, particularly in France, from the late l 7lli through the l 9lli century, specifically George Sand's work, in an effort to research instructional applications for cross-curricular foreign language instruction. Institutional fairy tales originated in Italy. The creation of a new genre of literature inspired many writers in Europe to imitate the Neapolitan and Venetian fairy tales of Gianbattista Basile as well as Giovan Francesco Straparola. In the late 17TH and 18TH centuries, in France, the first fairy tales were published, which have remained well known up to the 2I st century. In the 18TH century, Mme Leprince de Beaumont institutionalized fairy tales for children by omitting irony and unnecessary variants in her stories for children. In the 19th century, the Grimm Brothers adapted French and Italian fairy tales to their own language for a young German audience. Most French tales were also translated into English. From the 17TH to 19th centuries, fairy tales permitted women to reach a certain degree of freedom intellectually by expressing social and political concerns depicting their discarded society in the stories. Since fairy tales were not to be believed and not to be taken seriously, women could express themselves freely without been reprimanded, George Sand, a 19th century French author, contributed to the French Romantic period as well as to social and political sectors with her work. At the end of her life, George Sand wrote Tales of a Grandmother dedicated to her grandchildren. Ten out of thirteen stories are analyzed in this thesis in terms of characters, themes, and moral lessons. In Chapter Four, a curriculum is created based on the ten analyzed tales of Sand's Tales of a Grandmother. The curriculum addresses essential questions and activities to be taught in a French curriculum as well as cross-curricular. Chapter Five expands on the cross-curricular guidelines by providing activities based on Tales of a Grandmothers. In addition, a complete lesson plan on the "The Castle of Pictordu" tale is added in Appendix A. This lesson can be taught not only in French but in an interdisciplinary curriculum.

This thesis examines representations of the intimate as experienced by female protagonists, through expressions related to the heart, the soul and the body, in a comparative study of novels by French women writers from the 19th century and the present day. The corpus consists of seven novels : Ourika by Claire de Duras (1822), Lélia by George Sand (1833 & 1839), Monsieur Vénus. Roman matérialiste by Rachilde (1884), Femme nue, femme noire by Calixthe Beyala (2003), Vous parler d’elle by Claire Castillon (2004), Le Cœur cousu by Carole Martinez (2007), and Mon cœur à l’étroit by Marie NDiaye (2007). As a starting point, the thesis provides an extensive literature survey of existing research on the intimate as well as an introduction of the feminist and psychanalytic approaches underpinning the subsequent analyses, which are conducted in two parts, according to the personal and relational dimensions of the intimate. The theories of Beauvoir, Kristeva and Lacan offer perspectives on the intimate experience of women characters which is conveyed in literary imagery as the desire of the Other, and which is oppressed in a patriarchal symbolic order, although an aesthetic with specific narrative techniques related to women’s experience of the intimate is identified in most of the novels. These features include blurring and fragmentation of spatiotemporality, a marked intricacy of narrative voice, proximate first-person narrators, and the development of themes such as the writing of the body, sensed as a container. A discrepancy is noticed between the dominating androcentric posture of the heroines which is found in underlying discourse, and the sensorial dimension of their experience. This leads to a sublimation of body and sexuality in the romantic novels, a masochistic exaltation of the body and pain in the decadent novel and a psychotic and paranoid state in the novels from present day literature. The themes of female sacrifice and of death and denial of the body are very strong throughout the corpus. Relationships within the family are explored, including the mother-daughter relationships that are emphasised in the recent novels but not in those from the 19th century. Family structure, Christian culture and patriarchal, hierarchical social organisation are analysed as grounds for women’s alienation in the novels. The issue of perversion, which is striking in the novels on several different levels, is described as a transgression which involves the reader.

George Sand, née Aurore Dupin (1804-1876), est une des écrivaines les plus prolifiques de la monarchie de Juillet (1830-1848). Son œuvre monumentale s’intéresse à une myriade de sujets, qui sont souvent étudiés dans la perspective de l’idéal. Sand s’intéresse entre autres à la notion de poète-artiste, qui désigne un artiste idéal. Cette notion, propre à cette période, se distingue de celle du poète, qui est écrivain. Alors que la signification de la notion de poète-écrivain est arrêtée, le poète-artiste fait l’objet d’une définition vague et subjective. Pour sa part, Sand considère que le poète-artiste désigne à la fois un artiste et un philosophe. Cette proposition, qui est clairement émise, constitue un axe central à toute la pensée artistique qu’elle développe. C’est ce qui est exploré dans le présent travail, à travers trois thématiques de la pensée artistique de George Sand. Ces thématiques feront chacune l’objet d’un chapitre. La notion de la fraternité des arts sera d’abord étudiée. Cette thématique typiquement romantique, omniprésente dans les écrits de Sand, perçoit les différentes disciplines comme formant un tout. Ensuite, il sera question de la hiérarchie des arts : George Sand considère que la musique est la discipline supérieure, comparativement à certains de ses contemporains qui accordent plutôt ce titre à la poésie. Enfin, George Sand perçoit une figure de génie à travers ses écrits, qui s’approche de l’artiste idéal. Toutes ces thématiques sont étudiées en étroite relation avec les visions habituelles de l’époque, soit la monarchie de Juillet. / George Sand, born Aurore Dupin (1804-1876), was one of the most prolific writers of the July Monarchy (1830-1848). Her monumental work focuses on a myriad of subjects, which are often studied from the perspective of the ideal. Among other things, Sand was interested in the notion of the poet-artist, which refers to an ideal artist. This notion, specific to this period, is distinguished from the other poet, which is a writer. While the meaning of the notion of poet-writer is well determined, that of poet-artist is subject to a vague and subjective definition. For her part, Sand considers that the poet-artist designates both an artist and a philosopher. This proposition, which is clearly stated, constitutes a central axis to all the artistic thought that she develops. This is what is explored in the present work, through three themes of George Sand's artistic thought. Each chapter is devoted to one of these themes, with an attempt to organize the artistic thought of Sand. The theme of the brotherhood of the arts will be studied first. This typically romantic theme, omnipresent in Sand's writings, perceives the different disciplines as forming a whole. Then, the hierarchy of arts will be reviewed: George Sand considers that music is the superior discipline, compared to some of her contemporaries who believe that poetry is the superior discipline. Finally, George Sand perceives a figure of genius in her writings, which comes close to the ideal artist. All these themes are studied in close relation to the usual visions found under the July Monarchy.