The work examines the interweavement of individual memory and historical past in Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone, arguing that the genre of this ‘non-book’ can be identified with the ancient Greek notion of hypomnēmaton. The first section reads the Zibaldone as an answer to the so called ‘second printing revolution’, examining the text as the outcome of tension between the ‘library’ and Leopardi’s own writing. The second section analyses Leopardi’s use of quotations through the case study of Montesquieu’s presence in the Zibaldone, highlighting how quotations from Montesquieu shape Leopardi’s reflection on the fracture between antiquity and modernity and on the aesthetic problem of grace. The third section moves from the poem ‘Le Ricordanze’ (1829), showing how the questions challenged in the Zibaldone from a theoretical point of view (such as the relationship between individual memory and historical past, the notion of grace and the problem of making culture after the Enlightenment) are finally embodied in Leopardi’s return to poetry of 1828-29, which makes the Zibaldone-hypomnēmaton unnecessary. ‘Le Ricordanze’ stages an unmediated return of memory (mnēme) through which the hypomnēmaton is ultimately emptied of significance.

This thesis considers literary representations of religious travel in twelfth- to fourteenth-century francophone and Occitan texts. It is one of the first studies on medieval French- and Occitan-language literature to consider at length portrayals of religious travel. The research questions are, how does travel help characters and audiences access the divine? What effects does travel have on the traveller’s identity? How is travel affected by the politico-cultural background of the work? Chapter one considers the pilgrim, contrasting pilgrimage narratives with Lais. Drawing on Michael Cronin and Lawrence Venuti’s work, the author evaluates how travel engenders cultural denigration or appropriation. This appropriation reflects twelfth-century reformulations of the frontiers of the French-speaking world. Such readings suggest a remapping of north-west European areas of exchange. Chapter two addresses the hermit by evaluating versions of the Life of saints Barlaam and Josaphat. Using Brian Stock’s concepts, the author considers how textual communities in these texts imbricate translation and literary creation. Travel, translation, and literary creation work together, creating a pattern of spiritual translation which mediates the divine. However, the concept of God in these works is complex and varied. Thus the three texts may supposedly recount the same narrative, but they diverge. Chapter three considers the Crusader, by evaluating travel in a crusade chronicle and a chivalric manual. The author considers how travelling on crusade is motivated by a religious ethos, which is reshaped by the travelling it inspires. Crusading is shown to alter characters’ identities. A comparative reading demonstrates that the Crusader’s travel and military prowess are directed towards incompatible goals. Jacques Lacan’s work is used to chart how historical chronologies are subjectively rewritten. The author utilises Thomas Devaney’s ideas on cross-border interactions, demonstrating that textual incoherence is linked to encounters with non-Christians. These narratives pose questions which undermine their characters’ fanaticism.

This dissertation argues that insects provided a crucial lens through which Enlightenment thinkers could reimagine and represent their societies. It demomstrates that the understanding of the functioning of their individual bodies, the close observation of their collective behaviour, and its manipulation and management, helped eighteenth-century scholars to conceptualise, and root in nature, their social orders and the changes that they wished to see in them. While insect collectives such as bee swarms or ant colonies that had long been used to metaphorically model human societies, in the eighteenth century, these metaphors were reformulated and given an empirical basis. Investigating writings on insects on the part of natural historians, agronomists, philosophes and physicians, the thesis contributes to the growing literature on the role of animals in human history in general and in the Enlightenment in particular. It builds on two scholarly traditions: French studies and the cultural history of scientific, economic and political knowledge (mainly written after the 1980s). I take from French studies methods for the close reading of texts and more recent ideas on how ‘to bridge’ different fields of knowledge; the latter discipline will be useful in providing ideas about the history of observation and experimentation, theories of the animal and human body as well as eighteenth-century understanding of political economy. As this dissertation demonstrates, insects helped conceptualise new ideas of the human individual and his or her passions (chapters 1 and 2), of how human collectives are formed (chapter 3) and how governments can manipulate and regulate them in the most profitable ways possible (chapters 4 and 5). By investigating Enlightenment writings on insects, this thesis shows, we can recover part of the rich history of our modern understanding of our own ways of living together.

This thesis examines the Italian version of the Book of John Mandeville and its reception in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although the Book has been the subject of much critical investigation, the Italian redaction of the text has been largely ignored. Similarly, previous research into the reception of the Book has focused largely on its circulation in northern Europe. This study therefore aims both to bridge a gap in Mandeville studies and to make a valuable contribution to scholarly understanding of the circulation of vernacular literature in the Italian Renaissance. Research has been conducted along two principal lines. A close material analysis of surviving manuscript and printed copies of the Book has allowed the influence of individual actors on the text’s highly mutable content and form to be charted, revealing their specific attitudes and concerns. In addition to this, a broader survey of the Book’s influence on vernacular and Latin literary production in a number of genres has provided further evidence of Mandeville’s cultural impact. Following an Introduction that gives a more detailed analysis of the study’s scope, methodology and structure, Chapter 1 offers a broad overview of the Italian text and its manuscript and print circulation. The four following chapters each address a key theme in the Book’s reception, combining analysis of surviving manuscript and printed copies of the Book with a survey of its cultural impact. A Conclusion draws together these individual themes, offering some general considerations of the Book’s impact on Italian Renaissance culture and the place of the Italian version within the broader Mandeville tradition.

This thesis sets out to analyse the image of the city in the writings of Giovanni Raboni, in both his own poetry and his translations of Baudelaire. Raboni makes frequent references to Manzoni, not as the author of I promessi sposi, but of Storia della colonna infame, showing particular interest in the plague and the Lazzaretto. While Raboni’s writing looked to the future, it was firmly rooted in every aspect of post-war Milan, which he compared to the Milan of the preceding generation. The thesis investigates the theme of cityscape in three different ways, focusing on the cross-fertilisation seen in Raboni the critic, Raboni the poet and Raboni the translator of poetry. It explores Raboni’s poetry and the evolution of the cityscape, drawing on the interaction of translation and urban studies and approaching the poetry through the lens of Russian formalism. Chapter 1 provides the context for a detailed analysis establishing Raboni as a Milanese poet and highlighting the importance of the urban setting and architecture through the framework of critics including Benjamin, Certeau, and Augé. Chapter 2 looks at the motif of walking through Porta Venezia, Raboni’s favourite area of Milan, closely analysing the use of space and time in his poèmes en prose ‘Piccola passeggiata trionfale’ and ‘Nell’ora, ormai, della cenere’ and drawing on insights provided by two of his essays. Chapter 3, through a close reading of a selection of Raboni’s poems, investigates the urban space in domestic and public areas including such typical elements of cityscape as houses, streets, cinemas, and squares. Finally, Chapter 4 considers Raboni’s work as a translator of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal and looks closely at the interaction between Raboni the poet and Raboni the translator. Thus, the thesis shifts from a focus on Raboni’s own city of Milan to Baudelaire’s city, Paris.

The thesis aims to bring together the combined knowledge and research currently available relating to Manuel Lopes and his literary production, and seeks to provide further insight into the testimony of the author Manuel Lopes and his role and purpose within the Claridade movement. The study analyses the everyday reality of the Cape Verde Islands, its people and lands, and this is compared with the author's fictional representation, the characters, the principal themes, the author's main preoccupation with his fellow islanders, his style, and his purpose of supplanting the traditional literary theme of emigration with a radically new but simple one: the option of staying on the islands. The seven chapters of this study start with a theoretical discussion introducing the history of Cape Verde, the phenomenon of emigration as a constant of everyday existence on the islands, the four major waves of this constant exodus and their causes and consequences. This is followed by a brief biographical portrait of the author and then a discussion of how his own experiences brought him to explore the facts of life on the islands and insert them into his central literary themes. The literary portrayal of these realities, setting man's great love for the land against the ambiguous call of emigration, would thus lead him to lay down the bases for a new definition of Cabo-verdianidade. This leads into a general discussion of the new Claridade generation of writers, of which Lopes was a major exponent. Chapter six presents an analysis of the work Chuva Braba focusing on the characters who influence the protagonist Mané Quim either for or against leaving, thus revealing a clear pattern whereby the main theme of emigration becomes a debate between Partir and Ficar, between an abandonment of the islands and a new sense of loyalty towards the land of their birth.

Whilst Simone de Beauvoir has become an icon of feminism, and The Second Sex in particular been recognized as a point of reference for writers and philosophers worldwide, her reputation in Italy was not established immediately, and there she remains a controversial figure. This study focuses on one aspect of her influence in Italy: the relationship between her writing and that of the Italian best-selling author, Alba de Céspedes. It is the first in-depth analysis of the complex pattern of influence evident in the relationship between what the two authors have described as their most important novels, Les Mandarins and Il rimorso. Part I deals with the historical and theoretical backgrounds to this research. It provides a study of the socio-political events that are relevant to the narrative contents, and an overview of different theories of intertextuality. Part II is a detailed comparative analysis of the novels and establishes for the first time the precise nature of the relationship between Les Mandarins and Il rimorso ideologically and philosophically, as well as intertextually. In particular, this work explores a number of superficial resemblances between the novels’ structures, characterization and thematic content, and it also reveals a more sophisticated relation that is not manifest in the similarities, but rather in the way the texts differ from each other. This thesis brings two significant contributions to literary research: firstly, it will become evident that studies of de Céspedes’ life and works should include close attention to de Beauvoir; and secondly, it is an addition to a popular area of de Beauvoirian studies, that of the charting of the extent of the French author’s philosophical and ideological influence and of its legacy worldwide.

This thesis represents the first comparative study of Leonardo Sciascia and Antonio Tabucchi. It examines their literary engagement with socio-political concerns in a climate coloured by the scepticism and uncertainty of postmodernism and post-structuralism. This thesis seeks to counter current literary criticism, which suggests that engagement in Tabucchi's writing is confined to certain key texts, and to' instead show that committed writing underpins all of his work, including texts currently held to deal solely with literary concerns. Previous research asserts that Sciascia's work aims to engage with society, often employing the anachronistic term impegno to describe his writing. This thesis seeks to examine the ways in which Sciascia's engagement counters the political and literary challenges which led to the collapse of impegno by the 1970s. The thesis is structured in five parts. Part one charts the course of committed writing from the post-war era to its problematization during the 1950s and 1960s. It examines the relevance of Sciascia, Tabucchi, and the importance of 1975 as a starting point for this study. It goes on to explore direct engagement with specific events in their writing, and their employment of fictional lenses to factual writing. Part two examines ways in which the writers use the representation of geographical, historical and border spaces to engage with society. Part three considers ways in which Sciascia and Tabucchi view notions of uncertain truths and the inability of language to fully communicate ideas, as means of strengthening, rather than undermining, engagement. Part four investigates ways in which intertextuality, another barrier to engagement, is used by the two writers to dialogue with society as well as with literature. Part five studies the value with which Sciascia and Tabucchi imbue literature, as compared to journalism, and assesses the extent to which they view literature as a valid means of engagement.

Ortega y Gasset's assertion that 'to write well is to make continual incursions into grammar, into established usage, and into accepted linguistic norms' finds resonance in the work of a number of sub-Saharan Francophone African writers, most notably in texts by Ahmadou Kourouma, Veronique Tadjo, Werewere Liking, Henri Lopes and Sony Labou Tansi. The types of incursions that are most characteristic of these authors include the incorporation of visible and quasi-invisible traces of African languages, the exploitation of stylistic features associated with orality, including sustained use of colloquialisms and vulgarisms, and experimentation with various kinds of wordplay. Taking as its corpus all of the novels by these authors that are available in English translation, the thesis seeks to set the translations in their publishing context and to analyse the ways in which the translators treat the linguistic innovation of the originals. It reveals the dominance of translation strategies that normalise the linguistically or generically innovative features of the original texts, or, where these are retained to any significant degree, that separate them from the 'standard' language through typographical variation. When the post-colonial context of the original texts is taken into account, such normalising and exoticising strategies can be seen to have significant implications, diminishing the ability of the texts to carry broader cultural and political significance. For this reason, a number of critics have argued the need for a 'decolonised translation practice'. The thesis outlines the type of translation practice that might be viewed as 'decolonised', engaging in debates over the untranslatability of layered language, and drawing comparisons with other translation theories developed at the interface with post-colonial studies such as foreignising translation, the space between, and metametonymics.

Although a number of African literary works have been translated from French into English since the middle of this century, research and debate on their translation has remained scanty, fragmentary, and scattered in diverse learned journals and other short publications. This thesis seeks to broaden the scope of research by mapping out aspects of transference in translation in terms of analysis and transfer strategies that have been, or could be, used. A selection of major translated works have been compared with their originals, to give textual examples indicative of transfer strategies. Current issues in African literature as well as typical features of the literature in French and English have been explored in order to examine differences between them and English and French literatures. The implications of these differences (at the levels of content, cultural setting, peculiar use of English and French, and the target audience) for translation are considered, and a brief historical survey of the translation of African literature provides insights into how translators have approached, and continue to approach, literary texts as well as cope with their target readership. Furthermore, dominant trends in literary translation studies (mainly in the West) are explored to determine if, and in what ways, they relate to translation studies in Africa. The analysis of transfer strategies focuses on the distinctive features of francophone African literary texts, drawing on relevant Western literary translation theories and models, on African literary theory and criticism, as well as on other disciplines likely contribute to an informed understanding of the texts. Finally, a case study applies the analysis to a text which is translated, and transfer strategies discussed.