French émigré literature is both under-explored and under-valued by scholars. This thesis aims to rehabilitate the female émigré novel within its nineteenth-century landscape, putting to the fore its originality and pertinent contribution to contemporary movements such as Romanticism and the realist novel. Recent work has unearthed the émigré-specific way of narrating the Revolution; yet no clear definition has yet been established. This thesis defines what the émigré novel is based on the dichotomy for novelists of having experienced the exile first-hand or not. The memoirs and novels of three émigré noblewomen, Madame de Boigne, de Souza and de Duras, who all spent a decade in London during the 1790s, are scrutinized for this purpose. Three angles of research frame this comparative analysis: the search for the genre of the émigré novel, or how several genres intertwine in this ‘sub-genre’; trauma of the emigration as the core characteristic of the novels; and gender questions, or how the émigrée is using her stay in Britain as inspiration to convey more genuine relationships for post-revolutionary French society. This thesis goes against the idea that to interpret a novel based on the life of the author is reductive: instead it rediscovers the creative potential of the autobiographical which the émigrées chose to inject in their fiction works. Likewise, it establishes that the trauma of the Revolution and exile is visible in the selected émigré novels in the way it is camouflaged, enhanced and fictionalised, which constitutes their originality and distinguishes them from non-authentic émigré fictions. Finally this thesis considers the gender modernisation asked for in the plots, based on the fact that the selected novelists had enjoyed more freedom of action, uprooted from French social etiquette and within British society.

In 2011, the Performance and Theatre Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired an archive of materials relating to the French prisoners of war held at Portchester Castle from 1810 to 1814. This archive consisted of scripts, playbills, and abstracts from the prisoners’ Théâtre des Variétés built and operated in the basement of the castle’s keep. These materials have provided new and unique insights into the experiences of Napoleonic prisoners of war and have served as a catalyst for this first major critical study of Napoleonic prisoners-of-war theatricals. The majority of the theatre’s sociétaires were captured in the French defeat at the Battle of Bailen in July 1808. This study will be charting the journey of these French prisoners through their captivity in Spain, the Baeleric Islands, and Britain. While this particular group of prisoners has been the subject of previous historic surveys, their theatrical endeavours have been sidelined or relegated to footnotes or dismissed as a way to pass the time. In this study I will draw the prisoners’ theatricals to the centre of critical discussion examining their repertoire in greater detail underlining the vital role that theatre served in the prisoners’ emotional and psychological survival in captivity.

This thesis analyzes the three texts forming the so-called „Fantastic trilogy‟ by Tommaso Landolfi: La pietra lunare (1939), Racconto d’autunno (1947) and Cancroregina (1950), in the light of the cultural and historical environment in which they were produced. I argue that these novellas incorporate and obliquely problematize specific tensions of the period running from Racial Laws (1938) and the Pact of Steel (1939) to post-war reconstruction. Building on recent scholarship on the subversive role of the Fantastic, the study provides a more comprehensive view of Landolfi‟s early production and challenges accepted views on his Fantastic as exclusively ironical, intellectual and free-play. This thesis also investigates the sources through which Landolfi delineates this oblique form of socio-political critique. Whereas scholarship in the past has widely recognized that Landolfi draws inspiration from nineteenth-century French, Russian and German classics in the genre of Gothic and Fantastic fiction, this contribution draws attention to the way Landolfi negotiates this traditional repertoire through input from both Italy‟s „high‟ literary tradition (Dante, Leopardi, Manzoni, D‟Annunzio), Italian folklore and other non-literary sources (i.e. occultism and psychiatry). This thesis considers Landolfi‟s work from fresh angles, applying recent Anglophone theoretical frameworks (including theories on post-humanism, on the subversive role of the Fantastic and political readings of Gothic fiction) to his writing and probing his portrayals of dynamics and tensions that continue to challenge us today. Additionally, it makes use of the anthropological notion of „liminality‟ to underline the intrinsic thematic, textual and narrative ambiguity of the three novellas. I claim that the texts‟ liminality – involving slippery entities, settings, situations and narrative modalities that do not fit any precise category – voices the cultural and political instability of the decade under analysis. The study makes a deeper, and more nuanced, contribution to the literature on Landolfi, reflecting upon the author‟s strategies for problematizing contemporary historical and cultural issues by means of a fiction only apparently detached from reality.

This thesis elaborates upon Charles Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot's poetic negotiation of the erosion of the essentialist cognitive and moral foundations that hypothetically monitor human praxis and cement a stable subjectivity on the basis of the human subjects' co-inhering in a common horizon of understanding. I contend that Baudelaire's work consciously belaboured the collapse of vaulting cognitive frameworks and testimonial accountability in a way that reveals both the historical and trans-historical dimensions of the non-integratability of experience within a modem economy of existence. His work eschews the trappings of both aestheticism (history being one of its explicit and pervasive concerns) and historicism, since it reveals parameters of the reification of organic experience that are intrinsic to language and specific to the mnemonic abridgement of the subject's experiential trajectory. Moreover, Baudelaire's poetry compels the critique of the aesthetic abstraction from the social being of man, and solicits scepticism vis-a-vis straight historicism's teleological infrastructures and collateral crypto-transcendentalist angles. The examined poetry exposes the inner complicity of the two perspectives in question latent beneath their surface mutual closure. I examine T. S. Eliot's work in order to address the anti-essentialist motifs of his poetry in counterpoint to his literary criticism, and reveal the dialectic of cultural determinism (mostly materialising in the latter) and radical impersonality that resumes modernity's aporetic necessity to deploy egological categories within an agenda that has invalidated any notion of essence fundaments sustaining human experience. His poetry's homeopathic re-enactment of the experiential fragmentation that it thematically laments constitutes the privileged terrain whereupon essentialist construals of human subjectivity and history can be revealed to be inherently ideological. I have throughout drawn on Walter Benjamin's understanding of allegory and memory, along with Paul de Man's enhancement of the antagonism of the material and transcendental axes endemic in language and cognitive anchoring. This thesis explores the problematisation of essentialist configurations of subjectivity and history in the poetry of the archetypal poet of modernity, and the mutations they submitted to when they were inscribed within an aesthetic and political agenda that was far more reluctant to relinquish egological paradigms of communication and subjectivity. The underlying concern has been to elucidate Baudelaire's 'inexhaustible wealth of responsiveness vis-a-vis the collapse of organic experience, and his resistance to both historicist and reductively aesthetic appropriations. This thesis has aimed to analyse his treatment of experiential disintegration as an effect of historical juncture along with his welcoming address of cognitive and experiential reification as the outcome of the differential and semiotic character of language and memory.

Medieval nobility was a compound and fluid concept, the complexity of which is clearly reflected in the Middle English romances. This dissertation examines fourteen short verse romances, grouped by story-type into three categories. They are: type 1: romance and lost heirs (Degaré Chevelere Assigne, Sir Perceval of Galles, Lybeaus Desconus, and Octvian); type 2: romances about winning a bride (Floris and Blancheflour, The Erle of Tolous, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Degrevant, and the Amis-Belisaunt plot from Amis and Amiloun); type 3: romances of improversihed knights (Amiloun's story from Amis and Amiloun, Sir Isumbras, Sir Amadace, Sir Cleges, and Sir Launfal). The analysis is based on contextualized close reading, drawing on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. The results show that Middle English romance has no standard criteria for defining nobillity, but draws on the full range of contemporary opinion; understandings of nobility conflict both between and within texts. Ideological consistence is seldom a priority, and the genre apparently serves neither a single socio-political agenda, nor a single socio-political group. The dominant conception of nobility in each romance is determined by the story-type. Romance type 1 presents nobility as inherent in the blood, type 2 emphasizes prowess and force of will, and type 3 concentrates on virtue. However, no romance text offers just one definition; implicitly or explicitly, there are always alternatives. This internal variety indicates tha the romances imagine nobility scene-by-scene; even a text seemingly committed to one perspective is liable to abandon it temporarily if there is another better suited to the narrative moment. Ideological expression always comes second to effective story-telling. This means the texts are frequently inconsistent and sometimes illogical, but that multiplicity is of their very essence.

Caribbean writing is an emigrant tradition. The first waves of native-born authors from the region all spent significant portions of their lives abroad and, almost without exception, built their fame upon the desires of metropolitan audiences for knowledge of their colonies. Accordingly, the famous names of Lamming, Naipaul, Selvon, Césaire and Glissant are all stamped with a slightly less famous departure date. While many critics have noted these facts, there has been little sustained analysis of how the unique social positions and preoccupations of emigrants have affected the works of these five writers or their peers. This thesis is an attempt to address this issue. Its argument is that Caribbean emigrant authors spoke from unique social and conceptual loci. Through detailed, comparative readings of these five authors’ first major works, alongside considerations of their self-assessments, critical opinion on their oeuvres, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the organic intellectual, the argument advanced is that although these authors actively positioned themselves, and were positioned by their readers, in such a way that their emigrant status has had its importance elided, that status is present and potent in their post-emigration works. While the concerns of these writers all altered over the course of their careers, their early experiences of emigration shaped some of their most widely read texts and resulted in a harmony between them that transcends the authors’ differing islands of origin and their later thematic and political preoccupations.

The 'enigmas' dealt with in Part 1 (Chapters 1-4) are illusory, arising largely from the apparent inability of many of his critics to understand much of Borges' work. However, the discussion of his widely appreciated wit in Chapter 1 shows that this is sometimes the fault of Borges himself. He once proclaimed his intention to conceal the true nature of some of his fictions so that only 'a very few' of his readers should understand them. Fortunately, his attempts at concealment were not always successful; but some of his critics seem to have been misled by them. Chapters 2-4 deal with characteristics that appear to be less widely appreciated. Chapter 2 discusses the importance of Borges' obsession with death; chapter 3 deals with what he called 'the most precious gift, doubt'; and chapter 4 illustrates Borges' humility and his aversion to arrogance; but all three chapters demonstrate that Borges' critics have often failed to acknowledge these characteristics. Chapters 2 and 3 show that many of his poems make clear the importance of some of these factors. Borges regarded himself primarily as a poet, and published many more books of poetry than prose; however, comparatively little attention has been paid to this aspect of his work. Part 2 of the thesis (chapters 5 and 6) deals with the enigma which Borges himself presents. This is no illusion. It stems mainly from some of his seminars, lectures and non-fictional pieces, which are shown to be rife with inaccuracies, contradictions, and poor preparation. They raise many questions about the depth of Borges' learning, and about his academic rigour. Part 1 suggests answers, while Part 2 despairs of answers. A number of the quoted texts were published originally in English; I have no Spanish, and the remaining texts are quoted in translation.

This thesis explores, through a focused examination of the works of Alan of Lille and Dante Alighieri, the apophatic tradition or via negativa, with particular regard to the issues raised by naming God with human language. Thematic and stylistic reappropriations of Alan are highlighted, the aim is not, however, to establish textual dependency as such, but to explore the historical development of the via negativa, the problems it raises in medieval logic and theology, and the different approaches to the transcendence of the divine reality in the production, both prose and verse, of Alan and Dante. Since divine ineffability crosses a number of disciplinary domains – rhetoric, semantic, logic, metaphysics and theology – the thesis is attentive to all these topics and their interactions. Attention to these fields and to their development over time, both in the period before and after the entry of Aristotelian works at the end of the twelfth century, is employed in order to evaluate more closely the respective treatments of Alan and Dante. Chapter One reconstructs the interactions of Stoic, Augustinian and Aristotelian (by Boethian mediation) sources together with the Neoplatonism of Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (especially as transmitted by Eriugena) in order to provide a conceptual background for medieval discussion on the heuristic value of signs. In this chapter, attention is paid in particular to the contribution of the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition to medieval thought. Chapter Two provides an in-depth study to the medieval reception of the conceptual background delineated in Chapter One, particularly in relation to the issue of the transformations which human language undergoes when used in the theological field. This chapter assesses the impact of the new translations on the reconfiguration of the relationship between metaphysics and theology and related linguistic questions, illustrating shifts in the way that divine predication is handled and the richness and importance of the medieval understanding of the concept of analogy of being (analogia entis). Chapter Three deploys the historical context set out in the previous two chapters in order to compare Alan of Lille’s and Dante’s treatment of apophatic themes, by showing the different conceptual backgrounds for their reinterpretations of the theory of translatio and of the concept of analogia entis. The analysis thus departs from the extant scholarly concerns with Alan and Dante (namely, the use of figurative and allegorical devices) in order to provide a firmer historical and conceptual basis from which to understand their poetical choices in the De Planctu naturae and the Anticlaudianus and in the Comedy.

This thesis is a comparative study of three overtly unrelated authors. Thomas Mann, Kafka and Cernuda, setting them in a European context of a 'crisis of faith' where doubt in the existence of an ordered universe ultimately governed by God is becoming widespread. Rather than a philosophical or theological study, however, this thesis concentrates on the way that this loss of faith finds its expression in literature. After a brief introduction, setting the context, the focus is first of all on the way that faith in God (or some kind of Absolute) and order generally becomes lost, and the consequences of that loss in individual lives. Not surprisingly, this loss of order is grounds for despair, but what then manifests itself is a desire to find order once again. It is this desire for order which then provides the focus for the whole of the rest of the thesis. There is a desire both for absolute order and for order in the material world. Chapter two concentrates on the quest for absolute order, which would give genuine ontological security and a sense that there is ultimate meaning and purpose in the cosmos. This quest does however fail, but there are other quests for order, in both 'love' and erotic impulses and in art. The problems however continue, for 'love' is dominated by a sexuality which causes more chaos than it does order, and at its best is only transient. Similarly, art, while at times positive, at least temporarily, can divorce the artist from life and can bring him into contact with a darker, more 'chaotic' side of existence. There is also the desire to write literary works themselves, but this has problems of its own: the fluid nature of meaning and the fate of literature once it has left the control of the writer.

From Poesie to Poetry: Remaniement and Mediaeval Techniques of French-to-English Translation of Verse Romance, explores the use of remaniement, the art of rewriting, as the method preferred for vernacular translations of genres such as romance. A thorough history of the practice's principles are given, drawing on comments from Classical rhetoricians, patristic writers, authorities of the artes poeticae, and mediaeval translators employing the procedure. A textual analysis of the Middle English Amis and Amiloun follows, utilising a broadly structuralist approach which compares each individual episode and 'lexie' with its Old French and AngloNorman predecessors. This examination demonstrates remaniement to be the method used to translate the romance, highlighting both the important debt owed to the francophone traditions as well as the use of dynamic interpretation to lend the work salience to an English audience. A subsequent linguistic examination includes a new definition of formulae based on prototype theory which utilises mental templates to identifY occurrences. This permits the recognition of over 3000 instances of formulaic diction, many of which can be traced back to native preConquest traditions, as can certain aspects of verse and structure. What emerges, therefore, is a composite work heavily indebted to continental and insular French sources for content and some aspects of style, but largely readapted to lend it appeal to an early fourteenth-century Anglophone audience. The thesis therefore clarifies the establishment and use of remaniement, provides a detailed examp Ie of its use, and in doing so reveals the true extent of the oft overlooked debt owed to francophone traditions in creating English romances. By way of setting these dimensions into a wider context, the conclusion suggests such translations had a general effect on the development of a new insular style, setting standards for the independent creation of works in English as that language continued to re-establish itself as an accepted medium for literary expression.