My initial interest in the work of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo began in 1981 during the final year of a Degree in Comparative American Studies at the University of Warwick. This interest was further stimulated in the following year while I was studying for a Master's Degree in Latin American History and Literature at the University of Liverpool. It was here under the supervision of Dr. James Higgins that I began to focus specifically on Vallejo's last two collections of poetry, Poemas humanos and España, aparta de mi este céliz. both of which were written during his years in Europe from 1923-1938. Working in this area for two terms I became aware of the fact that while there are many excellent studies of Vallejo's Poemas humanos, as indeed is also the case with his first two books which were published in Peru, Los heraldos negros and Trilce. the same was not true of his final book on the Spanish Civil War, España, aparta de mi este cáliz, which has received disproportionately less critical attention than his other works. However, most writers would agree that the poems that Vallejo includes in this final collection are some of his finest. Consequently, it occurred to me that this imbalance was not simply a reflection of the aesthetic preference of Vallejo's critics, but rather an indication that those methods of investigation which had been successful when applied to the main body of Vallejo's poetry were wanting when it came to the study of his Spain poems. The source of this problem I surmised, lay in the fact that in contrast to most of Vallejo's earlier work, these poems represent a conscious attempt by the poet to incorporate political ideas into his art: a process which had apparently not been fully appreciated 1/ his critics. On the basis of this realization it was decided that a new approach to Vallejo's Spain poems might be explored, which would depart from existing methods of analysis which have tended to focus on textual interpretations of these poems, without taking adequate account of external influences on the formation of their content. Central to the formulation of such an approach would be an extensive study of Vallejo's intellectual development during his years in Europe aa indicated in his prose writings, and especially the articles which he wrote for the Peruvian press as a Paris based correspondent between 1923-1931; this being also the period which coincided with his first years of political commitment. Furthermore, an attempt would be made to place Vallejo's politicization within its contemporary historical context, so that the significance of his ideas and his poetry could be measured against the wider artistic and intellectual trends of the interwar years. The above proposals were duly submitted to Dr. James Higgins and Professor Clifford Smith at the University of Liverpool, and Professor Alistair Hennessy at the University of Warwick. Thanks to their recommendations to the Department of Education and Science I was granted an award to undertake two years full-time research. After spending a year examining the works of Vallejo's critics and all the available material in this country which deals with his years in Europe, I applied to the DES for financial assistance to make a research visit to Peru, where I hoped to gain access to the prose writings which Vallejo produced during the interwar years. Thanks to the support of the DES I was able to spend two months in Peru. During this period I worked mainly in the Biblioteca Nacional in Lima, where most of the articles which Vallejo wrote in Europe for the Peruvian press are kept. While I was in Lima I also received invaluable advice and assistance from a number of Vallejo scholars, and in particular Professor David Sobrevilla and Professor Willy Pinto Gamboa, of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Indeed, Professor Sobrevilla must be credited with making a substantial contribution towards the research for this thesis, by kindly agreeing to lend me a draft copy of Jorge Puccinelli's unpublished compilation of Vallejo's European journalism entitled Deade Europe. Even though this work does not include all of the articles which Vallejo had published in Peruvian journals while he was a foreign correspondent, having access to this earlier research saved several additional weeks of study in the Biblioteca Nacional, and gave me sufficient time to visit Trujillo where some of the articles not kept in Lima, or included in Deade Europe, are to be found. In Trujillo I worked at the Biblioteca Central of the Univeraidad Nacional de Trujillo which holds a complete collection of the regional newspaper El Norte to which Vallejo submitted numerous articles during the mid 1920s. On returning to England I embarked on a detailed study of Vallejo's intellectual formation in Europe as represented in his journalism, while at the same time attempting to link this process with the wider political, social, and intellectual developments of the period. Hopefully this research has resulted in a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the development of Vallejo's intellectual and political thinking during his years in Europe than has been recognised in previous studies of his life and works.

This thesis begins with an examination of the religious thought of Romain Rolland, showing how he derived an ethic of human solidarity that is fundamental to his later theorising about society and politics. The main sources of Rolland's ethic are indicated, and an attempt is made to set it in the context of modern French philosophy. Having established this base, the thesis goes on to examine chronologically the development of Holland's thought about politics, having as its central premise the notion that it is Rolland's search for a political system which would give full expression to his ideal of human solidarity that leads him towards various types of politics in turn. Several phases are distinguished in this evolution, starting with a period of vacillation between largely unformulated liberal beliefs and a violent, authoritarian style of politics, at the beginning of Rolland's adult life. We then take up his first involvement with socialism in the mid-1890's, his failure to elaborate a meaningful type of socialism in the context of his day, and his gravitation towards Darwinian and similar types of historical-political theorising; this phase culminates in the period of intense activity represented by Le Théâtre de la Révolution, coinciding with the Dreyfus case. Chapters V and VI deal with the period prior to 1914, dominated by Rolland's search for an 'internationalist' or European style of politics, and his analyses of national cultures and life-styles in Jean-Christophe: it is argued that this marks to some extent a regression from his previous socialistic preoccupations. Chapter VII shows Rolland's change of attitude during World War I, and his return to the conviction that social change was an absolute necessity in Europe. The next two chapters analyse Rolland's exploration of possible political bases for such a change, including such alternatives as Wilsonian internationalism, Gandhian non-violent protest and, eventually, Soviet Communism which, according to this thesis, Rolland accepted with slight reserve. The final chapter is retrospective, and aims to show how at key moments in Rolland's life, his artistic conception and execution was crucially shaped, if not determined by his political preoccupations. At all stages great attention is paid to the question of Rolland's intellectual sources and to putting his political thought firmly into the social and intellectual context of its day, rather than attempting to see it as an isolated phenomenon. To this end, numerous historical analyses and comparisons with contemporary figures are made.

This thesis analyses nine novels and two films by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, spanning the period from La Salle de bain (1985) to Nue (2013). Drawing on the hermeneutic phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur, it argues that Toussaint's texts can be fruitfully understood as representing fictionalised forms of reflexive narrativity. Through the close readings of the texts developed in this thesis, it is argued that Toussaint's anonymous fictional narrators are presented as both the readers and writers of their own lives, engaged in reimagining their own past experiences in ways which are heuristically motivated towards future possibilities for action, and that these reimaginings are represented both as and through the formal variations of the texts themselves. Also emphasised, however, is the way in which such refigurative narrative engagements are frequently depicted as deceptive or problematic. The first chapter, Self in the World, analyses La Salle de bain (1985), L'Appareil-photo (1988) and La Réticence (1991), focusing on the ways in which Toussaint's novels engage with thematic issues of subjectivity, identity, agency and the human capacity for reflexive narrativity. The second chapter, The Other in the Self, analyses two novels, Monsieur (1986) and La Télévision (1997), and two films, La Sévillane (1992) and La Patinoire (1999), focusing on the ways in which Toussaint's texts deploy various forms of ironic discourse in the critical mediation of the relationship between individual subjectivity and the exigencies of society, the workplace, and problems related to creative agency. The final chapter, Selfhood in the Other, analyses the novels of Toussaint's Marie tetralogy, Faire l’amour (2002), Fuir (2005), La Vérité sur Marie (2009), and Nue (2013), focusing on how this series interrogates philosophical questions of intersubjectivity by drawing on a number of historical conceptualisations of the aesthetic concept of the sublime.

This thesis investigates Rome as a site of modernity and an incubator of aesthetic modernism. More specifically, it analyses Rome’s visual and discursive imagery during the three decades that stretch from the end of the Second World War to the 1970s. It does so through a comparative analysis of literary, cinematic and critical texts. These include novels such as Levi’s L’orologio (1950) and Pasolini’s Petrolio (1992); films such as Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (1945) and Fellini’s La dolce vita (1959); critical texts stemming from Roman intellectual circles in journals such as Rinascita, La strada, Presente, and Nuovi argomenti; and historical analyses of Rome’s urban development such as those of Benevolo, Insolera, Cederna, and Vidotto. The aim of this study is twofold. On the one hand it challenges traditional readings of Rome as an anti-modern or pre-modern urban entity (i.e. the myth of the ‘Eternal City’), which was generated during the Grand Tour and has continued to inform academic scholarship on Rome. On the other, it shows that Rome lies at the centre of extremely significant constellations of modern images and discourses which can be compared to most studied examples of urban modernity such as Paris, London, Berlin or New York. From a methodological perspective, this thesis delves into Foucault’s notion of ‘Archaeology’. Instead of analysing texts in a strictly philological way, attempting to detect their affiliation or their belonging to specific traditions, this thesis investigates its sources as symptoms of history’s movements. Instead of framing Rome through traditional categories such as ‘Eternal City’ or ‘Modern Hell’, this archaeological analysis suggests the coexistence of three discursive formations of Rome’s modern image, which are based on the concepts of fleetingness, dilation and entropy. These three terms inform the three sections of the thesis. Furthermore, it argues that Rome represents a case of ‘anachronistic’ modernity that might allows us to depart from canonical interpretations of Italian modernity as ‘backward’.

This study examines the recent literary phenomenon known as the New Italian Epic, a label coined by Wu Ming 1 in a document called the Memorandum in 2008. Wu Ming 1 used the label New Italian Epic to describe a corpus of Italian texts, mainly published after the year 2000, that are an unusual mix of genres, styles and media, and that have a renewed sense of political and ethical commitment. After describing the phenomenon and outlining the main theoretical underpinnings to my analysis of it, I examine the Memorandum in detail, in order to individuate the ideas that will resurface throughout the study, related to postmodernism, new technologies, history and memory studies, epic, realism, and the role of literature in society. This is followed by a periodisation, which traces developments in recent history and literature that influenced the New Italian Epic phenomenon, including the Cannibal and migrant writers of the nineties, the violent events at the G8 protest in Genoa in 2001, and the political and cultural climate in Italy in the new millennium. I go on to analyse three key themes that particularly stand out in the New Italian Epic texts – the recurring theme of the death of the father, the use of the historical novel form, and texts that seem to be journalistic, but sometimes change or distort reality – each of which is accompanied by close reading of two or three novels from the New Italian Epic corpus, and compared to other previous or contemporary cultural developments in Italy and abroad. I conclude by considering the interactions between literature and film in the twenty-first century, and suggest that the ‘unidentified narrative objects’ we have seen throughout the study seem to be a particular product of our times.

This thesis is conceived as a general study of Flaubert's major works and as an assessment of recent critical approaches to them. Chapter 1 is an extensive evaluation of Sartre's L'Idiot de la famille, for which I claim the right to serious attention, before summarising its method and its argument that Flaubert's negative relationship to language becomes a positive one to style. This is set against Flaubert's own exposition, in both letters and works, of the problems of language and expression in the personal and artistic contexts. I show finally how other critics, in a very different perspective, have arrived at remarkably similar conclusions about Flaubert's concern for language as an opaque, material entity. Chapter 2 argues that Flaubert's aesthetic aims are equally served by the building of an illusion, i.e. that he does not undermine the idea of the novel as representation. The journey to the East is indicated as the turning point in the emergence of an aesthetic ideal combining stupidity, reverie and the aesthetic attitude to the world and to language. An examination of the formal organization of Flaubert's representations centres on the relationship between discourse and récit, with reassessment of such problems as impersonality, irony and point of view. A discussion of repetition leads to a consideration of the modernity of auto-representation. Within this formal perspective the last chapter argues against the common modern belief in Flaubert’s deconstruction of all stable meaning, reinstating the organizing function of character as a centre of value. Inarticulate and stupid characters, the traditional focus of Anglo-Saxon attacks on Flaubert’s lack of moral complexity, are shown to have privileged status in relation to vital aspects of Flaubert's aesthetic as established jn the first two chapters. A correct “moral” reading of the story will therefore have nothing do with an attitude to real life, but will depend upon awareness of the work's formal intentions.

This thesis focuses on the revisiting of several scientific theories on the part of Italian authors from 1865-1901, and illustrates how the process of assimilation was the effect of an accommodative process, which resulted in authors reinterpreting these theories in terms of a contrast between a visible and an invisible domain. The first chapter focuses on Arrigo Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ and Camillo Boito’s ‘Un corpo’ in order to show how the visible/invisible contrast becomes a hermeneutical grid by which the female body is defined, this body being the field on which medical normativity and the artistic approach meet and come into conflict with each other. The second chapter analyses how the visible-invisible contrast subtends Italian Spiritismo, a discipline that was read in scientific terms and (as in Luigi Capuana’s writings) as a theory concerning artistic – and literary – creation as well. Since the Spiritismo entails a process of ‘feminisation’ of the medium, which characterises both the ‘scientific’ and the ‘artistic’ facet of the discipline, the third chapter investigates the ways in which the female character has been represented as both a physical appearance and an elusive interiority (especially when dealing with the activity of reading) in Italian narrative from Tarchetti’s Fosca to the early twentieth century. As a conclusion, the fourth chapter retraces the formation of the visible-invisible dichotomy as resulting from the assimilation of European science through the analysis of the figure of the physician in Paolo Mantegazza’s Un giorno a Madera, Angelo Camillo De Meis’s Dopo la laurea and Luigi Capuana’s re-writing of his novel Giacinta. Moving from here, this thesis argues that the visible-invisible dichotomy is peculiar to the time span considered, as the twentieth-century will be distinguished by a general distrust towards – and trivialisation of – positivist science.

The dissertation centres on representations of disobedience in four defining Venetian novels published between 1753 and 1769: La filosofessa italiana; L’avventuriere, L’omicida irreprensibile and I zingani. The research sees disobedience as embodying cultural changes that occurred in Venetian society during the eighteenth century, in particular among the élite. Disobedience is understood as any behaviour demonstrated against figures of secular authority (as in the parent-child relationship). It is, however, instrumental to interpretation of the text at multiple levels. First, it functions as a narratological device that triggers the development of the plot; second, it informs the didactic aims of the novel, by giving examples of behaviour performed by figures of authority, or subordinates. Third, it embodies changes experienced by readers in their contemporary life, offering a way to mediate conflicts through fiction. The dissertation investigates this function in relation to the élite, a heterogeneous group of high-income individuals from different classes. This group is identified as a privileged addressee of the novel. The dissertation investigates the centrality of Venetian élites from two different angles. In the first part, the analysis focuses on publishing activities, cultural consumption, and the development of the Venetian book market. It shows how the emergence of the novel is closely related to the economic transformation of the market, and the role played by the urban élite, that had become a target audience for new cultural products such as the novel. The relationship between literary representation and Venetian élites is further demonstrated through the analysis of the four novels. Alongside the analysis of disobedience from a literary perspective, the thesis adopts the topos to highlight cultural and social issues involving Venetian élites, such as the clash between generations; the reshaping of education; and the shift in social attitudes which transfers value from status to to wealth. The research argues that, through the representation of disobedience, novels set limits of acceptable behaviours, mediating between individual needs and social requirements, and suggesting possible solutions to existing conflicts. The dissertation stands at the crossroads of history (in particular Venetian history), literary criticism, and history of the book. This interdisciplinary approach makes an original contribution to the literary debate on the eighteenth century Italian novel and offers an innovative perspective from which to look at the emergence and development of this genre in the eighteenth century.

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