For several reasons, translingual writers, defined here as authors who write in a language that is not their native one, have gained increased visibility in recent years. This is particularly true in the context of French literature where, more frequently than before, and with a more explicit recognition of their particular status, translingual writers have received important literary prizes and have been welcomed into the French Academy. Central to this recognition is their rich and diverse mobilisation of life writing, a corpus curiously neglected in the study of the phenomenon of literary translingualism. This thesis focuses on the writers Andreï Makine, Hector Bianciotti, Vassilis Alexakis, Nancy Huston, Agota Kristof and Katalin Molnár. It demonstrates that the translingual experience, in its capacity to question one's sense of self and provide novel tools for the exploration of one's personal history and subjectivity (conceived as an experience in language), appears eminently suited to the genre of life writing and that, in the current configuration of the French literary space, life writing is demanded from translingual authors. It proposes an original cartography of contemporary translingual literature in French, suggesting that more than any similarities in the conditions of their literary adoption of French, what creates family resemblance between translingual writers is the types of relation with their adopted language that are constructed in their autobiographical texts.

This study investigated the production of literary themes as cultural products in two historical periods: The French Romantic Movement and the Beat Generation in America during the 1950's. The study defined the fundamental literary themes of the French Romantic Movement and examined the sociological factors which led to the development of this system of ideas. In turn, the French themes were used as an analytical device to determine if these themes existed in the Beat Generation and if the Beat Generation could be viewed as a social and literary movement in the tradition of French literary history. Following a comparison of essential ideas of each movement, the study investigated the sociological factors which led not only to French Romanticism, but to the Beat Generation as well. The project provided a thorough, systematic content analysis of the literary themes of the Beat Generation, and concluded that the Beat Generation may be considered a system of ideas in the tradition of French Romanticism. In addition, several similar abiding sociological factors were present in both historical periods. The study projected the possibility of vanishing alternative Bohemian sub-cultures in modern society and the advent of the twilight of romanticism. / Doctor of Philosophy

To call something 'inverted' or 'topsy-turvy' in the sixteenth century is, above all, to label it as abnormal, unnatural and going against the natural order of things. The topos of the world upside-down brings to mind a world returned to its initial state of primeval chaos, in which everything is inside-out, topsy-turvy and out of bounds: fish live in trees, children rule over their parents, wives command their husband and rivers flow back to their source. This thesis undertakes a detailed account of the development of the topos of the world upside-down in sixteenth-century French literature and visual culture. By examining different uses of this topos - comic, moralising and polemical - it relates the transformations of the topos to religious, social and political conflicts of the period. To explain the shift of this topos from comic and moralising device to satirical and polemical tool, this thesis argues that troubled times produce troubled texts. In order to demonstrate this hypothesis, two kinds of evidence will be examined: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 present diachronic evidence of the 'polemicisation' of the topos of the world upside-down in literary genres of the period (adages, paradoxes and emblems) and within François Rabelais's body of work; Chapter 3 and 4 provide synchronic evidence of the polemical use of the topos of the world upside-down during the French religious wars in Huguenot and Catholic polemic and in depictions of socio-political turmoil. Charting the variety of uses of the topos of the world upside-down throughout the sixteenth century, this thesis connects the world upside-down and its historical context; and contributes to the scholarship on religious polemic.