The Ancien Regime's fall forced a re-evaluation in narrative outlook: the works of Stendhal register this post-revolutionary confusion. Chapter I considers paternal surrogation as furnishing the novel's narrative springboard. The erosion of the Patronym shoots Julien Sorel to the pinnacle of his career: pinnacle turns into brink. Happy Endings are eluded, to the general scandalization of critics, who have read a different novel encoded within Le Rouge. Chapter II focuses on Freud's patriarchal structures, suggesting that the Story of Fathers and Sons is inherently more narratable than that of mothers (example: the occulted Mme Sorel). Framing this plot of filial subversion are twin blades: the sawmill and the guillotine. The novel emerges as fantasy-construct of filial design: "Julien Sorel" is presented as a medium tendentiously refracting textual psychoconstructs. Chapter III probes the name's evocative power, addressing problems of intertextuality. Eradicating the patronym simultaneously lays bare the son's name, around which other bio-narratives cluster. Julian Hospitatur and Julian the Apostate constitute palimpsest texts beneath the surface narrative. The fate of John the Baptist (present in the novel) dictates Julien's, over whose decapitated head other tales converge. Le Rouge opens on a Primal Scene of Writing. Chapter IV examines the novel's indictment of the usurpatory capacities of the Word. First the Son's weapon, the Father appropriates the Word, containing its contagion in secret libraries. Paternal speech yields to its degraded progeny, writing, which subsequently virilizes Mathilde. Only the Mother stands untainted. Blades, the erstwhile signifiers of castration and metonymy, are here re-read as agents of parturition. The five church tableaux group characteristics clearly uterine; birth is in turn incorporated into the narrative dynamic. The birth scenarios inaugurating each cycle function metaphorically, lending coherence to a syntagmatic flow otherwise doomed to meaningless repetition. The blade stands at the juncture of metaphor and metonymy, myth/history, Maternal/Paternal. The ending traditionally misapprehended as the decapitation shifts to the projection of Julien's "son" left dangling in utero as the textwork is accomplished at the expense of closure: the babe-in-a-matrix constitutes a restitution of the originary lack out of which this celebrated narrative has been spawned.

The theme of cruelty emerges as a fundamental element in the numerous and varied interpersonal relationships of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu. Cruelty in Proust's major artistic creation is actively present in situations involving two or more characters who inevitably assume either one of two roles, that of victim or of aggressor. Cruelty exists in the novel as a state in which the victims cannot and do not escape from their fate of mental subordination, while the aggressors consciously continue with success in the psychological massacre of their weaker, more sensitive opponents. Among the major victims are found the following characters: Saniette, the timid archivist; La Berma, the talented actress; Vinteuil, the gifted composer; Swann, the art-loving dilettante; and Charlus, the eccentric aristocrat. All are sensitive, creative individuals who are overburdened and ultimately consumed by the sordid reality of their existence. Monsieur and Madame Verdurin, the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes, Odette, Morel, and Francoise represent the primary aggressors in the novel. The analysis of the interpersonal relationships in A la recherche du temps perdu is aided by the closed nature of the Verdurin salon which the Verdurins effectively control with the collaboration of Odette and Morel. The Duke and Duchess of Guermantes reign as the aggressors of the artistocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain. Francoise skillfully manipulates the household staff of the narrator's family. The basic information of the narrator's hypersensitive nature is examined by analyzing the environment in which he is nurtured. His grandmother and mother provide a protective shell for the sickly child where love and the absence of selfish motives dominate. These two women represent the antithesis of cruelty in the novel, and the narrator's sheltered childhood contrasts sharply with the forces of ambition, greed, egocentricity, jealousy, and superficiality encountered elsewhere. Though studied for many other qualities, Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu merits a reassessment of the impact of the theme of cruelty on the novel. The characters and their roles have been carefully conceived and developed within the structure of the adversary relationship which separates the protagonists into the roles of victim and of aggressor.

Madame d'Aulnoy's Contes des fees and Nouveaux Contes des fees were published in 1697 and in 1698. They were immediately successful and wre reprinted numerous times during the eighteenth century, both inside and outside of France. These fairy tales appeared at the beginning of a period in which the fairy tale itself was very popular in France. The popularity of the fairy tale genre was due to three factors: an existing belief in the merveilleux, popular literary tradition, and a number of historical, economic, and social factors. The success of Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tales may be traced to her use of a popular genre and themes; to a lively style; and to a structure that embodied the transformation taking place in the French outlook of the beginning of the eighteenth century. Although the genre of Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tales is formally the conte, these fairy tales are more like the dominant prose fiction genre of the time. This genre combined the brevity and chronological presentation of the nouvelle with the romanesque and love-oriented features of the roman. Love is the most important theme in the Contes des fees, and it is treated there as it was in the nouvelle/roman of the time. Travel and utopias are themes found in these fairy tales which will be more fully developed by the eighteenth century. The presentation of animals recalls the long seventeenth-century debate over the rational capabilities of animals, a debate that continued well into the eighteenth century. Nature is seen as a courtier at Versailles would know it. Magic, enchantment, and metamorphosis is the most common theme and one that is natural to the fairy tale. Madame d'Aulnoy uses a variety of techniques in the contes: characterization through names, descriptions, and some psychology; humor and irony; a rapid and familiar style; and realistic details. The structure of the contes des fees was considered, first, for types of events and the sequences of these events and, second, for meaning. The method of Vladimir Propp showed that Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tales are complex and that her heroes and heroines are frequently more passive than is usually the case in fairy tales. The approach of Carl Jung revealed that both the heroes and heroines were continually in a process of renewal and transformation. As a minor work, the fairy tale collection of Madame d'Aulnoy offers insights into the period when the seventeenth century became the eighteenth. Style and structure have the dynamic qualities of the eighteenth century. The epic hero of the seventeenth century seems to have become much more passive, but the appearance of hidden resources within him assures the continuance of the process of transformation and renewal which the Contes des fees present.

These independently-articulated readings of two nineteenth-century historical novels, Vigny's Cinq-Mars and Flaubert's Salammbo, reiterate the theft and restitution of the elusive signifier in Lacan's well-known metaphor of psychoanalysis (and reading): "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'." Such a reading subverts the consolidated subject--the claim to unequivocal meaning in History--of Vigny's Romantic text, and consolidates the disseminate subject--the impossibility of assigning a meaning to History--in Flaubert's Realist novel. In Cinq-Mars, an initial focus on the novel's powerful and central scene of a popular uprising--a movement of revolt and repression which in a sense repeats the act of writing, the ordering of resistant signifiers into a form--leads us to a subsequent analysis of the character of Richelieu who embodies the Lacanian truth of the signifier as Master of the signified. He is the Other Author of the other text, the surface of signifiers, the metonymic chain of writing against which Cinq-Mars, as subject or signified of Vigny's counter-text, will provide the metaphoric illusion of depth and the vocal plenitude of Truth. Richelieu represents the alterity and opposition of a language the author of Cinq-Mars must overcome in order to accede to readability and meaning. In contrast to Cinq-Mars, Salammbo breaks down into a multitude of jewel-like shards which cannot be recomposed to reflect the wholeness of a literary or social architect, or Meaning as embodied in the person of the Author or, more abstractedly, in the coherence of a recognizable ideology. Our reading consolidates the subverted meaning of Flaubert's History by focusing on the philosophically-privileged motif of the veil. In Salammbo, the veil is momentarily "lifted" (in its plurality of meanings) to reveal what the novel's most eminent critics have failed to take into account: the undeniable spiritual evolution of Salammbo and Matho, whose ultimate demise can no longer be read as an unequivocal sign of pessimism, but as a celebration of becoming conscious.

The vocabulary of l'Assommoir is one of movement; it is the vocabulary of dance. The way in which people and even animals and machines move is expressed in terms that evoke the ballet of nineteenth-century France. Thus l'Assommoir presents an example of transposition of art. The relationship of dance to literature has not been studied before, so the terms of the study have to be determined by using anthropological and sociological studies of dance and works on ballet theater. The text of l'Assommoir is divided into sections like the acts of a ballet. The plot, like a balletic pretext, is less important than the telling of the story, the description of movement, and the expression of life through gesture. The ballet of l'Assommoir has a precedent in French ballet with repect to plot, character, theme, atmosphere, and symbolism. The method by which Zola achieves this evocation of ballet consists of three parts: word choice; association of gesture with certain situations and character types; and the use of techniques associated with the stage. The dance has influenced literature in many ways, beginning when "literature" was an oral, not a written, phenomenon, as in Homeric times. The stage has also been a place where the two genres met. In addition, many writers, such as Diderot, have sought to infuse more life into language by incorporating dramatic techniques into their words and their works. In nineteenth-century Paris dance and the figure of the dancer were important in the arts as a whole. Also, the concept of performance and performance viewed were the subject of intellectual and artistic interest. L'Assommoir's episode in the Louvre illustrates this point: The wedding party is a commedia dell'arte troupe parading through galleries viewing paintings, while they themselves constitute a spectacle, which in turn is reflected in the paintings. The emphasis on movement and the dance heighten the symbolic value of Gervaise's limp. This symbol, which makes her lame in a world of dancers, unites the poetic constructs of the text, even calling on images from ancient myths. The artistry with which Zola uses this symbol and the way in which it both unifies the text and unites l'Assommoir with the rest of the Rougon-Macquart cycle is a tribute to the often overlooked artistry of the author.

The appearance of the servant-hero in prominent eighteenth-century works such as Lesage's Gil Blas, Marivaux's Le Paysan parvenu and Diderot's Jacques le fataliste reveals a continuing preoccupation with the problem of the subservience of the individual in society. Stereotypes of inferiority subtly persist in the diverse manifestations of the character of the servant, and his social ascension does not automatically grant him acceptance or power. In general, elitist social attitudes common to the literature of the Ancien Regime continue to inhibit egalitarian trends suggested by the servant's rise to literary prominence. In the novels under consideration, the servant's role as a serious literary personage undergoes an evolution towards greater sophistication and complexity. From the acceptance of servitude found in Gil Blas, the former servant negates it entirely in Le Paysan parvenu, whereas there are hints in Jacques le fataliste that servitude might also offer access to liberation. These novels best exemplify the three levels of meaning associated with the servant and the matter of servitude: a literary level, most closely linked to the conventional and comic role of the valet; a social level, the image of man's interaction in a social environment; and finally a philosophical level, an interrogation into the problem of human freedom. Each of these novels is also structured around the continual formation and dissolution of the master-servant relationship, both literally and figuratively. Interaction among men is consistently defined between the poles of domination and servitude, on all levels of the social hierarchy. Parallels with the Hegelian paradigm of Master and Slave exist, but these eighteenth-century models fail to achieve a dialectical resolution. Only Diderot effectively suggests the liberating force of the slave. Finally, the nature of the narrative voice in each novel is also linked to the servitude of the hero. The servant participates more and more actively in the telling of the story, just as the narrator shows an increasing degree of control. However, the servant's struggle for power, like the narrator's quest, remains ultimately unresolved. The narrator must face his own subservience to his audience and to literary structures which, like the social structures they embrace, remain resistant to change.

Although published in 1959, the "Herodiade" manuscript has received very little attention. The purpose of this dissertation is to end this critical silence by a reading of the integral work which consists of some 200 pages of notes, variants and published texts. After a preliminary critique of Mauron's psychocritical reading of Mallarme (in particular his practices of translation, biographical speculation and textual reification), I examine Mallarme's view of the creative process as it appears in his early correspondence. The poet's discussion of productivity, negativity, depersonalization and the writing experience provides a springboard for drawing a number of striking analogies with Freud's theory of the Unconscious and dream interpretation. The focus of the ensuing chapters is on the problematic of creative process as mirrored in the production of the work itself. Chapter III is a reconsideration of Herodiade's narcissistic ego as a fictional construct which duplicates the relationship of the writer to the work. In Chapter IV, a comparison of Mallarme's and Freud's notion of the "uncanny" sets up my analysis of processes of repetition and repression in the textual variants for the "Prelude." A confrontation of the various versions of the "Prelude" demonstrates the persistent influence of covert psychic processes which have camouflaged phantasms of procreation, incest and death in the final draft. Chapter V analyzes how the castration motif in the "Cantique de Saint Jean" works as a metaphor for both the force and failure of textual production. It is by following the perpetual transformation of disruptive and ambivalent elements between variant and text that one finds a psychic economy which opens up "Les Noces d'Herodiade, Mystere" to alternative readings.

Rather than separating play and Preface this study applies the same critical reading to both works, exploring them from the point of view of their common structure of desire. Cromwell's desire for political sovereignty parallels Hugo's desire for poetic sovereignty. A confrontation of the two texts reveals the poetic project which Hugo weaves into the symbolic and dramatic structures of Cromwell before expounding it in the Preface. In working out the poetic project in the play, Hugo grafts onto the plot of Cromwell a metadramatic discourse which serves as a commentary on the events of the play and introduces the theoretical perspective of Cromwell. Theatricality and playacting form the point at which plot and metadrama intersect. Cromwell's four fools play a crucial role in mediating between the two levels of the play and in linking the play to its Preface. The fools tear off the mask worn by the Protector and uncover his ambitious schemes. Cromwell's quest for the crown becomes the pretext for an investigation into the nature of kingship which is shown to begin and end in violence. The sacrificial nature of kingship reveals itself to Cromwell during the coronation ceremony. To avoid death at the hands of the puritains he is reduced to the role of an actor performing the comedy of sacrifice. It is precisely when Cromwell interprets the symbolic process of sacrifice that the drame comes into being. The structures of representation of the drame entail the union of opposites which translates on the esthetic level into the alliance of the grotesque and the sublime. This, then, is the inaugural moment of romantic drama. The death of kingship which Hugo inscribes into the play is the condition of the founding of the new drama. The poet lays claim to the sovereignty and the sacred attributes of which the king has been dispossessed. Hugo's choice of historical setting and subject becomes clear. The crumbling of the mythic and sacred order brought about by the French Revolution and the regicide has resulted in the emptiness of the center. The poet is to occupy this center and to appropriate the symbolic process.

This new reading of L'Assommoir and Nana in the light of Transactional Analysis applies to the psychology of Nana (an aspect so often denied, especially by Zola himself) and demonstrates that it overshadows the simple portrayal of a temperament. Thus Nana's premature death can be seen as the tragic ending of a Life Script. The Transactional Analysis theories presented by Eric Berne and developed by his disciple Claude Steiner deal in the first place with a structural analysis of the personality divided into three ego states: "Parent", "Adult" and "Child". Interpersonal relations which give the name to what these psychoanalysts call "transactions", deal with a three-step quest: a thirst for "strokes" or recognition (namely love), a thirst for a definite position ("I am OK, etc$\...$") and a thirst for time structure. A tragic life script, which is determined by early "injunctions" and "attributions", unfolds like a classical tragedy in a three-part development: the Prologue, the Climax and the Catastrophe. The study of both L'Assommoir and Nana shows that Nana's life follows a similar pattern. The Prologue is her disastrous relationship with her parents. The submission to a mother's deadly rejection and the revolt against a repulsive father, for whose fall she is held responsible, result in a negative attitude toward love and in the compulsive repetition of man's fall. The Climax, during which she appears to achieve a measure of social success, is however an unstable situation. Despite her wealth she is bored to death and experiences an inner void. After an attempted suicide she is driven away by her chronic dissatisfaction to a sudden long journey which ends with the Catastrophe. She comes back to see her child die and then dies of smallpox soon afterwards. Brought up without love and with no model of love, Nana's life unfolds without a satisfying love relationship and the heroine can therefore be seen as the victim of a No Love Script.

One of the distinctive features of the Encyclopédie was the creation of a new status for the crafts and trades in France. This work takes an inventory of over 300 trades and implements a unique methodology for documenting them. The iconographical dimension of this methodology becomes a crucial component in the endeavour to furnish practical and useful instruction where words cannot deliver. Diderot's underlying intent is to reveal the inventions of the artisans and the particular operations relating to their trades, with the objective to sensitize his audience to the necessity and honour of manual labour, eradicate existing prejudice held against the artisan and heighten productivity for the nation. The innovative qualities of the Encyclopédie are in large part responsible for its commercial success and the successive versions which follow. The cheaper, small format editions reach a wider readership, but they suppress all of the plates relating to the crafts and trades, thus compromising Diderot's social vision. However, if we look a little further afield, outside of the direct lineage of Diderot's Encyclopédie, we notice that the Encyclopédie méthodique conceived and launched by Panckoucke, takes up the original content of the first edition in its entirety and publishes it in an accessible edition, organized this time by subject area, which gives birth to the Arts et métiers mécaniques dictionary. We shall determine how this specialized dictionary is the most effective conduit for Diderot's social ideology of all the avatars of the Encyclopédie in the XVIIIth century. / L'invention d'un statut pour les arts et métiers constitue pour une large part l'originalité de l'Encyclopédie. Cette dernière recense plus de 300 métiers et établit une méthodologie innovatrice pour les documenter. La dimension iconographique se révèle essentielle pour fournir des informations pratiques et utiles là où les mots font défaut. Diderot désire exposer les inventions des artisans et les procédés de chaque métier dans le but de sensibiliser le public aux bienfaits du travail manuel, d'éradiquer les préjugés envers l'artisan et d'accroître la productivité de la nation. L'originalité de l'œuvre est largement responsable de son succès commercial et de sa fortune. Les éditions portatives, moins chères, voient le jour et rejoignent un public élargi, mais les éditeurs ont décidé de supprimer les planches relatives aux arts et métiers, compromettant la vision sociale de Diderot. Pourtant, une autre édition, publiée ultérieurement, hors de la lignée directe de la première édition, voit le jour. Il s'agit de l'Encyclopédie méthodique de Panckoucke qui reprend l'édition originale dans sa totalité et la rediffuse par ordre méthodique qui donne naissance au dictionnaire Arts et métiers mécaniques. Nous allons déterminer comment ce dictionnaire spécialisé parvient le mieux, de tous les avatars de l'Encyclopédie du XVIIIe siècle, à diffuser l'idéologie sociale de Diderot.