This thesis endeavours to establish the facts concerning the life of the abbe Lenglet, based on archival, manuscript and printed evidence: his socio-economic background, his chequered 'political' career, his abortive attempts at integration into the church establishment, his many clashes with the royal administration and the resulting numerous periods of imprisonment. It shows how books were, from the early years, a major preoccupation in his life, whether as librarian and book-trader, or bibliographer, editor and author. Having failed to secure a living through either state or church, the abbe's publishing activities became the principle, though never the sole preoccupation of his life. A documented study of the redaction and publication of each of Lenglet's works and editions, and the public response which greeted them, is complemented by a detailed analytical bibliography which adds to our understanding of the material conditions pertaining to the dissemination of ideas in the first half of the eighteenth century. The thesis concludes that the abbe Lenglet's character was deeply marked by inconsistency, dishonesty and cynicism, and that these traits seriously affected the quality of his work. But, at the same time, he was an erudite and enterprising bibliographer, and he had a bold, consistently critical, and sometimes original mind. Thanks to these latter qualities, coupled with an often foolhardy disregara for authority, he wrote or edited a number of important and influential works. In this he was actively helped and encouraged by more 'respectable' scholars, members of the robe class and close to the royal administration, who would not themselves risk any open association with the publication of 'subversive' material; their atttiude to the abbe was highly ambiguous. He was also responsible for popularising, sometimes in a regrettably adulterated form, the works of greater writers. Though he lacked the ability of a major original author, he nonetheless made a significant contribution to the literature of the period. Moreover, the study of such a secondary figure adds a new, and perhaps indispensable dimension to our understanding of the social and intellectual climate of the eighteenth century.

This thesis aims to highlight the presence of a large and varied production of contemporary Italian travel writing and to analyse the reasons for its 'invisibility' in the Italian literary system and critical tradition. Through the use of a comparative approach to genre and of current theories developed in the area of Translation Studies, the thesis will outline the different status attributed to travel writing in the Anglo-American and the Italian literary systems. Such a comparative approach allows the study to escape the narrow confines of a perspective based on the idea of national literature and to adopt a wider view, which, in turn, highlights the presence of phenomena otherwise easily overlooked or discarded as insignificant. The peculiar characteristics of travel writing, a genre mostly based on the representation of the Other for a home audience, are also analysed in order to point out their affinity with translation practices and, ultimately, to underline the 'double translation' implied by translated travel writing. The case studies which make up the remaining part of the thesis are intended to illustrate different aspects of the genre of travel writing; to provide scope for an analysis of its boundaries and connections with other genres (ranging from ethnography to autobiography, from journalism to fiction, from the essay to the novel); and to illustrate the way in which generic expectations influence both the selection of texts for translation and the strategies adopted when translating and marketing them for a new audience. The writings of twentieth-century Italian explorers to Tibet, and their translations into English, constitute a significant case of adaptation of foreign texts to the needs and expectations of a British audience (and to the British interests in the geographical area concerned). The works of Oriana Fallaci and their different reception in Italy with respect to the UK and the USA illustrate the way in which personal biography and generic choices can intersect, determining both the popular image and the critical success of an author and of her work. Calvino's choice to sublimate the genre of travel writing in the stylized fiction of Le citta invisibili is treated as an example of the way in which a text which is meant to provide an escape from a low-status genre can become an icon of that same genre once it is translated and read in a different cultural context. Finally, the case of Claudio Magris's Danubio and of its English-language translation provides evidence of the complex network of literary references which marks the reception of a text in different cultures, and of the way in which generic affiliation can both promote the recognition of a 'marginal' text and constrain its more idiosyncratic (and original) characteristics.

This thesis gives an extended account of the fictional and theoretical works of writer, essayist and painter Pierre Klossowski. Through a close analysis of the relationship between his essayistic and novelistic writings it considers the way in which Klossowski comes to theorise the nature of the literary artefact as a space of theatre or spectacle and how such a formulation questions received notions of identity and traditional distinctions between the literary and philosophical per se. The first chapter is devoted to Klossowski's writings on Sade. This involves a short account of the articles he wrote in the 193Osbut also a comparison of the 1947 and 1967 editions of his full-length work on Sade entitled Sade mon prochain. This is followed by a discussion of his later reading of Sade its relation to writings on Sade by Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. Through this the crucial shift in Klossowski's conceptions of the Self and of identity that occurs between his earlier and later writing has been traced. The second chapter looks at Klossowski's writing on and relationship to Nietzsche. This relationship is articulated under the motifs of parody, translation, and myth. The sense of these motifs in relation to Nietzsche's texts is analysed with reference to a number of works by Klossowski (La Vocation suspendue (1950), Nietzsche et Ie cercle yicieux (1969), and Le Bain de Diane (1956)). From this discussion Klossowski' s emphasis on the fortuitous character of the Self and on writing as spectacle has been highlighted. The third and final chapter examines Klossowski's trilogy of novels Les Lois de l'hospitalite, and in particular the figure of Roberte, and concludes by arguing that the truly transgressive force of his writing lies in the way in which it overturns the notion of origin and with that the concept of identity and self-sameness.

The study of Jean Guehenno in the inter-war years is divided into three main parts. The first deals with the development of Gw!henno's personality and ideas, which preceded the publication of his major works, and explores his debt to certain literary figures. The second deals with the main texts Caliban parle and Journal d'un homme de 40 ans, whilst the third explores his role as editor and director of Europe and Vendredi respectively. The first chapters consider the difficulties Guehenno encountered in reconciling academic success with his poor origins. Moreover they present the problem of his experience of the First World War, his decision to become a teacher and the influence of Daniel Halevy in his early literary career. The second part is an analysis of Guehenno's two most important texts. With respect to Caliban parle the issues raised include co-existence in a world without God, the solution of a contractual society with all its implications for culture, and the problem of revolution as a personal spiritual ideal. In the case of Journal d'un homme de 40 ans, where Guehenno reaffirms his earlier individualism, his discovery of a style to suit his intellectual preoccupations is considered, as is the fact that his work is primarily a personal protest against war. The third section of the thesis deals with Guehenno's role in Europe as well as in Vendredi and with the extent to which these papers reflected the interests of his major works. Furthermore, in the case of Vendredi the problem of the confrontation between idealism and political necessity posed by "engagement" is examined, using Guehenno's articles on the Front Populaire and the U.S.S.R. The conclusions drawn are that Guehenno is an important influential and representative member of the group of "intellectuels engages" which worked in France in the inter-war years, because his work raises their common problems of intellectuality, class, culture and pacifism. Equally importantly however, his case illustrates the dangers posed by intellectual commitment to a political cause - dangers which led him to adopt an ultimately conservative position, and which on a more general level led to the dispersal of the "intellectuels engages" as a group.

Thethesis examines how somewomen writers of fiction relate to the question of literary tradition in the 1980sand 1990s. Contemporary literary practice appears to be dominated by postmodern anxiety about a state of 'late arrival' as writers. I wish to explore how womenwriters' experience of the weight of literary predecessors is affected by their different subject position. I chooseto site this study within the area of fantastic fiction for several reasons. The fantastic tradition in Italy was largely overlooked by the critics until the 1980s- a factor which has exacerbated the neglect ofwomen's contribution to it. More importantly the fantastic is now vaunted by contemporary criticism as an area conducive to transgressive challenges to traditional literary practice, particularly for women writers. At the same time, however, the traditional tropes ofthe predominantly male-authored canon of fantastic literature offer a problematic and challenging range of gender stereotypes for female authors to 'rewrite'. I choose to focus on the notion of space both literally and metaphorically in the development ofthis thesis. In the opening chapter I tease out the threads which connect space, Italianwomenwriters and the fantastic. I beginby showing that the fantastic itselfis often construed spatially as a genre and offers potential for spatial innovation. This suggests a subtler way of looking at womenwriters' use of literary models, which avoids falling into simplistic analyses of gender portrayal. I then outline the position of womenwriters in Italy in relation to the genre ofthe fantastic. I suggest that the missing sense of a womenwriters' tradition in this genre maybe one reason whythe fantastic is used to explore self-consciously the relation betweenthe female writer and the male authored text. Finally I showhow the fantastic offerswomen a space in which to re-write, namely through their manipulation ofthe literal and metaphorical spaces ofthe text. The following two chapters execute this study with close reference to texts by four authors. The second chapter is dedicated to the early fiction ofPaola Capriolo whoseexperience ofliterary tradition as a particularly claustrophobic space inspired this thesis. I agree with the widely held viewthat her use of a Gothic-oriented fantastic, which privileges a world of enclosure in labyrinthine interiors, reflects a typically postmodern anxiety about the end ofliterature. I argue howeverthat the anxiety ofthe writer's relation to literature is more closely linked to her identification with a predominantly male literary tradition. This gives her writingsome interesting links with muchearlier examples ofwomen's writing. It also provides an interesting springboard from whichto look at the treatmentof similar themes of enclosure in work by other women writers. The final chapter follows the emergence of new models ofthe fantastic in the work ofthe writers FrancescaDuranti, RossanaOmbres and Laura Mancinelli. I suggestthat in their work we see a contemporary use ofthe fantastic 'al femminile' which juxtaposes the external space with the internal space, giving rise to the recurrent motifoftravel. I argue that this use of the fantastic genre pushes the genre in a new direction, towards a space in which the internal fantasy and dialogue co-exist.

The thesis tackles two main issues. Part I explores Levi's engagements with the `two cultures' debate concerning the relationship between literature and `science' in postwar culture. Building on existing scholarship, I provide a more comprehensive view of his project to combat the two cultures divide. I contextualize the literature-science debate in Anglophone and Italophone culture, and then investigate dialogues between Levi and his contemporaries (for example, the writer Italo Calvino; the physicist Tullio Regge). Among other theoretical frameworks, I draw on critical approaches to the literature-science relationship and Bahktinian dialogics. Part II analyzes Levi's portrayals and critiques of science and technology as they impact on human life and freedoms, especially his problematizations of relationships between humans and machines in a post-industrial society. This aspect of Levi's work, particularly his representations of bodies and embodiment in a technologized age, has received little critical attention to date. I evaluate Levi's engagements with such issues, focussing also on gender dynamics in his writing about technologically-mediated embodiment. Given the absence of sustained Italophone critical reflection on these questions, I analyze Levi's work in light of recent Anglopone theorizing on posthumanism. I also refer to psychoanalytic approaches to the self. Considering Levi's approach to a series of perceived cultural dialectics-the relationships between science and literature, science and society, human subjects and machines-I argue that his work is characterized by contradiction. He asserts the need to break down cultural and disciplinary boundaries while simultaneously revealing his personal tendency to conceptualize literary and scientific activities, for example, as distinct practices. I conclude that by embracing such contradictions his work highlights areas of difficulty, and, without attempting to offer falsely universal solutions, reminds us of our capacity to maintain-or reclaim-corporeal and epistemological sovereignty of ourselves and our society.

This thesis explores the published work of Tierno Monénembo, Guinean author born in 1947. The main themes are space and narrative, and precisely how subjects creatively employ both. The thesis argues that Monénembo presents a reconfiguration of African subjecthood by centralising nomad subjects: characters who are wily débrouillards, ever on the move and ready to (re)invent both space and self. In a series of postcolonial rewritings, Monénembo reframes subjects beyond notions of race or victimhood. Their practices of invention are grounded in contexts rendered precarious and unstable by chains of violence and multiple losses, and the author represents these spaces in innovative language in several genres. Mobility, or its absence, determines the themes, characterisation, and language in each of Monénembo’s texts. It is addressed here via a number of contexts which position him within ongoing debates around historicisation, identity, and power in the postcolonial world. Chapter One looks at imperialism and the re-writing of history via Le Roi de Kahel and Peuls. In Chapter Two I explore dictatorship and the conflicting discourses which vie for space around it: the texts under examination are Les Crapauds-brousse and Les Écailles du ciel. In Chapter Three I discuss writing after genocide and other trauma. In comparing L’Aîné des orphelins to Cinéma and La Tribu des gonzesses I find common trends of performative storytelling which mark out Monénembo’s protagonists as self-inventing survivors. The final main chapter groups together four exile texts to assess the effects of rupture and loss on language and space. Reading Un Rêve utile, Un Attiéké pour Elgass, Pelourinho and Le Terroriste noir reveals the creative agency at work in Monénembo’s dislocated nomad subjects. A number of theoretical anchor points help to frame these studies and for these I draw on the work of Michel de Certeau, Achille Mbembe, and Patrice Nganang, among others. The thesis is concluded with a look at Monénembo in his own words as I draw together my predominant observations alongside his autobiographical comments.

This thesis draws on the rapid development of scholarship in both Translation Studies and Postcolonial Studies in recent times and seeks to explore the interdisciplinary overlap between them with a study of English translations of French Caribbean texts of a Martinican origin. The thesis corpus focuses on three well-known Martinican writers and an examination of their key texts. The authors were chosen in order to deconstruct the mythologization of these texts and identity in translation, particularly considering how in some instances misrepresentations have come to be embedded in the anglophone understanding of the texts. The corpus consists of Frantz Fanon’s texts Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) and its translations by Charles Lam Markmann (1967) and Richard Philcox (2008) and Les Damnés de la terre (1961) and its translations by Constance Farrington (1963) and Richard Philcox (2004); Patrick Chamoiseau’s novels Chronique des sept misères (1986), translated by Linda Coverdale (1999), Solibo magnifique (1988), and Texaco (1992) both translated by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov (1999 and 1998, respectively); and Mayotte Capécia’s novelette Je suis Martiniquaise (1948), translated by Beatrice Stith Clark (1997). This study is important because of the approach taken in examining these canonical texts and therefore provides an original contribution to knowledge in several ways. Firstly, the purpose of the translation analysis is to ascertain if Western translation strategies tend to prevail, even when translating texts from a different socio-cultural background. Secondly, by using this analysis, we can then assess the degree to which the identity of both the source language text and, to an extent, the author have been manipulated for the purposes of appealing to the target language readership and market. Thirdly, I then propose both an alternative methodology for examining Caribbean texts in translation using Édouard Glissant’s theory of Relation as a foundation, and also a reading of the concept of ‘translation’ that extends beyond the linguistic to take in ethnography and transformation of the Self, with both approaches exploring the concept of identity and how it is created in both source and target language text. My findings indicate that, although in theory, Translation Studies is moving away from a primarily Western, binary appreciation of translation strategies, this movement has not yet manifested itself meaningfully in the practice of translation. This establishes that these Caribbean depictions of identity have been modified to appeal to a Western anglophone target market. However, a fully developed Caribbean focused translation theory has also not yet been put forward, nor indeed, a translation theory that focuses on the practice, rather than the theory of translation, thus demonstrating areas open to future scholarship and study.

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), writer of fiction, literary critic, political journalist and thinker, is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century literature and thought. The relationship between art and technology is a largely unexplored aspect of Blanchot’s writing; this thesis examines his engagement with the question of techne in criticism and fiction over a fifty-year period and demonstrates that he is far from subscribing to the technophobia of probably the most influential thinker of technology, Martin Heidegger. It is argued that writing for Blanchot is a mode of techne which destabilises the opposition between nature and culture, or nature and technology, or nature and history, and provides a means of thinking other than the anthropos. The chronological approach of this thesis stresses how a thinking of writing as techne radicalises over time and indicates the enduring influence of Blanchot. The first chapter considers the treatment of the division, often taken for granted by critics, between literary and everyday language; focussing on Blanchot’s reading of Mallarmé in essays dating from 1940 to 1952, this chapter reveals a shift in his thinking of literature from autonomy to radical non-essentiality. The second chapter examines Blanchot’s critical engagement with Heidegger in essays written in 1953 and shows how we might reconcile Blanchot’s work with ecological thought. A third chapter focuses on the discussion of modern technologies in essays from the 1950s and 1960s and the coincidental emergence of the non-concept of the neuter in literature and criticism; it listens to various apocalyptic tones in work from this period to reveal a continuity between the experience of the technological and of the imaginary. The final chapter explores how ‘technique’ is everywhere implied once the term disappears from Blanchot’s idiom; it argues that fragmentary writing is that techne which outplays the human.

Evil in Hugo’s later novels has rarely been examined. This subject is clearly incompatible with the received image of Hugo(based on earlier works such as Les Misérables) as a prophet of optimism and progress. This thesis will demonstrate that it is reasonable that Hugo should have expressed negative thoughts in the novels that he wrote in the 1860s and 1870s, since contemporary Western writers were also producing pessimistic works. Attention will be drawn to the personal anxieties and disappointments which only served to intensify Hugo’s experience of the universal fin de siècle malaise. The thesis will posit that the universe of Hugo’s later novels is much darker than that which is delineated in his earlier novels. Hugo’s renewed interest in the works of de Sade indicates his increasingly pessimistic perception of human nature (Introduction). The representation of benevolent motherhood that is found in the earlier novels has been supplanted by the depiction of vampiric female monsters in their successors (Chapter 1). The later novels do not focus on positive creation and the movement towards progress, but on negative metamorphosis that is often rapid and invariably irrevocable (Chapter 2). Justice can be seen to be done in the earlier novels because evildoers are eradicated, but in their successors villains prosper whilst the innocent are treated harshly (Chapter 3). In Hugo’s earlier novels, laughter and dreaming are depicted negatively but their sinister nature has become much more profound in their successors (Chapter A). Disdain for human existence is most vividly suggested by ravenous mouths which seek to ingest mankind into the foul chaos they contain and this chaos is predominantly feminine (Chapter 5). Whilst the thesis would not deny Hugo’s belief in God, it will assert that in his later novels Hugo portrays a universe in which the forces of darkness are extremely powerful (Conclusion).