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The histories of the Theater and of the Novel have rarely been linked to one another. Nevertheless, studying the evolution of the two arts as of the seventeenth century, allows us to pinpoint and define the sources of contamination. It is more precisely in the nineteenth century that the history of both the Theater and the Novel became envenomed, going from fresh influences to disloyal relations during which time the Theater faded by admitting romanesque realism to take the stage. By denying its capacity to reveal the "real", the Theater failed its possibilities and let its art be disinterested from the theatricality showing all that should have been evoked. Men of theater participated at recapturing the theatrical art so to regain confidence on stage and near 1950, an avant-garde movement flourished to favor a renewal of vitality for the theater with a new language which utilizes all of what the scene could provoke. This "New Theater" is soon followed by a similar romanesque enterprise, the "New Novel", a group of novelists also wishing to acknowledge the right to explore a new style of writing.

Within the body of "migrant" literature, the work of Marie-Celie Agnant is distinguished by its strong testimonial nature. The author herself ascribes a certain instrumental role to literature; through her fictional narratives, Agnant bears witness to the collective experiences of women in Haiti and also of female Haitian immigrants in Montreal. What, then, of the function or literary value of her work? This thesis responds to this question through the study of three works by Marie-Celie Agnant: La Dot de Sara (1995), Le Livre d'Emma (2001), and Le Silence comme le sang (1997). The analysis of the complex relationship between testimony and fiction in Agnant's writing leads to a reflection on the specific character of socially impelled female literature: women writers are driven by the imperative of memory and the desire to convey their occulted history.

This dissertation examines the symphony in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France by way of individual chapters on the period's seven most influential and frequently performed works: Camille Saint-Saens's Third Symphony (1885-86), Cesar Franck's Symphony in D minor (1887-88), Edouard Lalo's Symphony in G minor (1886), Vincent d'Indy's Symphonie sur un chant montagnard franrcais (1886) and Second Symphony (1902-03), Ernest Chausson's Symphony in B-flat (1890), and Paul Dukas's Symphony in C (1896). Beethoven established the primary paradigm for these works in his Third, Fifth; and Ninth Symphonies, and the principal historical issue I address is how French composers reconciled this paradigm with their own aesthetic priorities within the musical and cultural climate of fin-de-siecle France. / Previous critics have viewed this repertoire primarily with limited structuralist methodologies. The results have often been unhappy: all of these symphonies are in some ways formally idiosyncratic and individual, and their non-conforming aspects have tended to puzzle or disappoint. My study draws on recent methods developed by Warren Darcy, Scott Burnham, and others that emphasize the dynamic and teleological qualities of musical form. This more supple approach allows a fuller appreciation of the subtle and sophisticated ways in which individual works unfold formally, and the spectrum of procedures French composers employed. / My study demonstrates that the factors shaping the French symphony in this period included imperatives of progress as well as the popularity of the symphonic poem. Some of the earlier symphonists covered in this study also felt the need to confront Wagner's influential theoretical writings: mid -century he had famously proclaimed the death of the symphony. As many writers have argued, the archetypal heroic "plot" that Beethoven's symphonies express embodies the subject-laden values---notions of individual freedom and faith in the self---that prevailed in his time. Different inflections of this plot by French symphonists, I argue, reflect the variegated ways fin-de-siec1e French culture had received these values.

Long suspected of being frivolous, of cultivating bad taste and of encouraging its reader's chimerical daydreams, the novel, at least after Cervantes, curiously turned against itself in the name of the reality it was once accused of fleeing. In doing so, it changed radically, of course, since it separated itself from the old idealistic romances which it now named as its enemies; but it also remained, more discreetly perhaps, faithful to its origins, i.e. to the lies and illusions whose profound and secret necessity novelists have never ceased to reaffirm. / This dissertation is a meditation on the paradoxical foundation of the novel, which can be defined according to the classical theories of Rene Girard and Mikhail Bakhtin. The former, by assigning the novelist the task of revealing the "novelistic truth", insists on the critical function of the novel, and on the decisiveness of the change brought about by Cervantes; Bakhtin, by placing the character rather than the author at the heart of his reflexion, and by making dialogical "openness" to this character a positive value, subtly defends the necessity of the "romantic lie". / Girard and Bakhtin are both right, as the examples of the three novelists whose "poetics" are analyzed here in light of this paradox illustrate. Paul Valery, though not a novelist in the usual sense, is the creator of Mr Teste, a strange character who lives in perfect conformity with the requirements of the "novelistic truth", but whose life is inconceivable, which makes him a comic figure. Flaubert, enclosing himself in a kind of quiet lucidity, keeps his characters at a distance but still shows a sort of subtle sympathy for them. Finally Balzac, whose posture at first seems more romantic, is no less quiet and distant than Flaubert, albeit in a more discreet way. / These reading exercises, together with theoretical considerations inspired by Bergson's definition of the comic and Kundera's metaphoric definition of the novelist's work as the exploration of being, lead to the idea that the novel is subjected to contradictory requirements between which it does not propose a synthesis, except that of humour -- which is not truly one.

This thesis develops and refines a term used initially by Bill Buford to refer to works of contemporary realism. Dirty realism characterises a strain of realism first appearing in American and Canadian writing during the 1960s and increasing in prominence through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. The study focuses on the scholarship surrounding both the term and the works of particular authors, and applies the theories of Fredric Jameson and Michel de Certeau to develop a basic critical vocabulary for engaging the fiction and poetry of Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Mark Anthony Jarman, as well as other writers treated with less intensity, such as David Adams Richards, Helen Potrebenko, Al Purdy, and Bobbie Anne Mason. In particular, the dissertation attempts to develop a critical terminology through which to discuss dirty realist texts. The most prominent of such terms, the "hypocrisy aesthetic," refers to dirty realism's aesthetic of contradiction, discursive variance, and offsetting of theory against practice. The chapters of the dissertation deal with the emergence of the hypocrisy aesthetic through a study of literary genealogy, history, and theory. The second chapter, "Dirty Realism: Genealogy," traces the development of major currents in twentieth-century American realism, particularly naturalism. Arguing for dirty realism as a variant of naturalism, the chapter traces the transmission of ideas concerning dialectics, determinism, and commodity production from Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, through James T. Farrell and John Steinbeck and ending with an extensive discussion of Charles Bukowski's Factotum. The third chapter, "Dirty Realism: History," addresses the impact of the Cold War on the development of dirty realism. Referring to major critics on the period, this section of the dissertation follows the development of hypocrisy as a form of discourse eventuated by Cold War contradictions, particularly between that of democratic freedoms proclaimed abroad and the atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia on the domestic scene (as—in the USA—in the HUAC hearings chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy).

This thesis examines the inward turn of the contemporary Chinese novel: a tendency in fictional narrative to move from representing social reality and political events from an "objective" point of view to exploring personal experience, especially the interior world of human beings, from a subjective point of view. I take three novels published in the early 1990s as examples: Yu Hua's Crying in the Fine Rain(1991), Ge Fei's On the Margins (1992), and Wang Anyi's Fact and Fiction: One Way to Create a World (1993). I demonstrate a new narrative mode emerging, with thematic innovations and formal changes, against the background of the collapse of Communist collectivist ideology and the "master narrative" of socialist realism. In these three works, first-person autobiographical narrators are employed to explore personal experience and private life, a space once repressed and forbidden in modern Chinese literature. Reflections on growing-up, personal memory of the past and the imaginative search for identity can thus be read allegorically as a Chinese Bildungsroman of the awakening consciousness of Self. This new narrative not only emphasizes the importance of inner territory, but also ushers in a subjective writing which has greatly altered the appearance and conception of the Chinese novel. Chronological line is broken up into a psychological temporal order; plot and event become obscured within mental scenes; and omniscient didactic voices are replaced by self-conscious, reflective minds. Such individualistic, modernist narratives challenge the former collective, socially-oriented "realist epics" produced since 1930s, providing an alternative form and function for the modern Chinese novel.

This thesis examines the use and function of the human body as a surface that is inscribed with a number of socially significant meanings and how these inscriptions operate in the specific late medieval cultural production. Drawing on Jauss's notion of the social and political significance of medieval narrative, I seek to determine how specific texts contribute to a regulatory practice by thematizing bodies that are perceived as "other," that resist or defy an imagined social norm or stereotype. Each of the dissertation's four chapters treats a different set of notions about the human body. The first one examines Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale and The King of Tars as representations of ethnographic difference. I argue that the late Middle Ages did not have the notion of "race" as a signifier of ethnic difference: instead there is a highly unstable system of positions that place an individual in relation to Christian Salvation History. Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is at the centre of chapter two that examines the moral issues surrounding leprosy as a stigmatized disease. Reading the text as a piece of medical historiography, I argue that one of the purposes of the narrative is to establish the link between Cresseid's sexual behaviour and her disease. A discussion of the homosocial underpinnings of late medieval feudal society, particularly in light of Duby's notion of "les jeunes," forms the basis of the final two chapters. Chapter three discusses Chaucer's Legend ofLucrece and the narrative function of rape as a pedagogical instrument with the aim to ensure the availability of untouched female bodies for a "traffic in women" between noblemen. Chapter four examines transgressive sexual acts as the objects of jokes in fabliaux, such as Chaucer's Miller's Tale. By using shame and ridicule as their main strategy, these texts, I argue, fulfil an exemplary function and act as a warning to young noblemen to maintain an erotic discipline as future heads of feudal houses and as an upcoming political elite.

In this study the dramatic and novelistic aspects of Galaico-Portuguese poetry are analysed. We point out the dramatic tendency of the cantigas showing that the troubadours and jougleurs grouped together a certain number of cantigas with a dramatic purpose. This is demonstrated by the 12 cantigas with which Lopo L(')ias has created a satirical play, which we have entitled Os Zevroes, and which will be studied in the last chapter of this study. / Secondly, the narrative and thematic structures of some 1.150 love songs are analysed. In this case, the cantigas de amigo and the cantigas de amor are seen by us as if they had been written by only one author, who had proposed to create with them a complex sentimental plot in dialogue. / In order to prove the existence of a sentimental narrative romance in the Cancioneiros, the cantigas de amigo and the cantigas de amor have been classified into three categories: (a) third-person cantigas, in which the poet describes what the young girl (Amiga) does and says; (b) polyphonic cantigas, in which the poet dialogues with a female character (the pastourelle represents a particular kind of polyphony) and (c) sentimental cantigas, in which the poet disappears altogether, leaving way for the archetypal characters (the Amiga, the Amigo, the Mother, the Go-Between, etc) to express themselves freely, enabling us to reconstruct a dramatic-narrative romance. The analysis of this romance is based upon the formal and thematic particularities of the sentimental cantigas. / The sentimental cantigas, in monologue or dialogue form, are open utterances. They are mutually complementary and they are spoken by archetypal characters, always denominated in the same manner, but who lack a proper name, who communicate among themselves, but are not described by the poet. These characters are "voices" that have been grouped together in this study in a causal and chronological order, so as to define the theme and the plot of the archetypal romance of the Cancioneiros. / The narrative structure of the archetypal romance can be appreciated in the 374 cantigas de amor and de amigo which are found in the Appendix to this study, titled "Narrative anthology of Galaico-Portuguese love poetry".