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This study examines Algernon Charles Swinburne’s work as a critic and creator of prose fiction, arguing that it deserves to play a larger role than it has done hitherto in our understanding of him as a writer. It considers a wide range of Swinburne’s prose, situating it in the intellectual movements of his time, and identifying recurrent themes and interests. Finally, it makes a case for a broader view of Swinburne that includes his literary criticism and imaginative prose. The first chapter discusses Swinburne’s prescient criticism of the Brontës and his suggestion that the novel ought to aspire to the status of high art. The second chapter reviews Swinburne’s assessment of Wilkie Collins, which uses the language of the stage to draw comparisons between sensation fiction and drama. Turning to Swinburne’s continental European influences, the third chapter establishes Baudelaire and Hugo as inspirations for Swinburne’s theory of aesthetic practice, though neither directly shaped his serious prose fiction. Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, which had a much more direct impact through its promotion of sexual and aesthetic autonomy, is discussed in Chapter Four. The fifth chapter studies Boccaccio and The Decameron as a significant source for Swinburne’s proposed Triameron and its surviving short stories. The sixth and seventh chapters focus on Laclos and Balzac, arguably the greatest influences on Swinburne’s novels. Laclos’s epistolary fiction and Balzac’s cycle of interlocking tales are immensely important for Swinburne’s theory of the novel and for his novels themselves. Chapter Eight is an extended study of Swinburne’s novel A Year’s Letters, which displays innovative epistolary form and incisive character studies. Chapter Nine interrogates Lesbia Brandon as a meditation on the youth of a poet and an avant-garde example of Swinburne’s hybrid, poetic prose.

This thesis is an investigation of literary institutions and print culture in France during the two decades following the Second World War. It demonstrates how the changing metropolitan literary marketplace, driven by new methods of book production and bookselling; the rise of internationalism and tiers-mondisme; and a nascent notion of francophonie, accommodated writing of and on sub-Saharan Africa. The first half of the thesis focuses on three institutions of particular significance: the publishing houses of Le Seuil and Présence Africaine, and the Association nationale des écrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer, known for the literary prizes it administered. Diverse strategies for evaluating representations of sub-Saharan Africa are explored through new research in the archives of these institutions. The tensions between specialist and more commercially orientated publishing, between anti-colonial and exotic representations of sub-Saharan Africa do not map cleanly onto separate institutional contexts in this period. These tensions are underpinned by shared political and aesthetic debates, technological resources, and social contexts. The second half of the thesis analyses in greater detail the publishing process of selection, production and distribution in seven individual case-studies of novels by Christine Garnier, Abdoulaye Sadji, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Malick Fall, Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe and Peter Abrahams. Aspects considered include: readers’ reports and editorial revision; the use of pseudonyms; the development of named collections; the role of literary translators. My methodological approach works with, and at times against, a Bourdieusian framework, to describe the literary field in this period. More specifically, Pascale Casanova’s depiction of Paris as capital of the “World Republic of Letters” is tested and nuanced through the historical focus on the period 1945 – 67. Rather than a passive annexation to the colonial centre, African literary production is shown to be intrinsic to and constitutive of the restless political and aesthetic landscape of post-war reconstruction and decolonisation in the French-speaking world.