This thesis seeks to address the literary, cultural and historical questions surrounding what I will suggest was the reconceptualization of fame in the second half of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth centuries. The only previous analyses of celebrity in this period by Leo Braudy and by Frank Donoghue have claimed categorically that even though a democratization of fame occurred in this period only men had sufficient access to the fame machine and thus to the experience of the frenzy of renown. While I argue that this period witnessed the birth of modern concepts of celebrity, I will suggest that a modernization necessarily entailed a feminization of fame. Traditionally, heroic self-sacrifice had led to assured immortality, but with the rapidly expanding print culture of this period, celebrity was often instantaneous, achieved during a lifetime rather than a lifetime achievement. With the dissemination of the media, the rise of newspaper and periodicals and thus, more importantly, the increasing visibility of the celebrity as a person to be admired and emulated came the means to seduce an eager audience by manipulating one’s career or personal image. Opening with an examination of the confessional politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who sought and found a desiring audience for this outpouring of private sensibility and thus initiated a discourse of fame which no longer relied upon the classical stoicism apparent since Ancient Rome, I will investigate how women writers not only ‘puffed’ themselves in the press, but actively engaged in constructing distinct authorial personae in and through their writings. Far from cowering anonymously in the shades, women writers were actively seeking and achieving the limelight, attaining a level of cultural centrality previously thought by critics such as Braudy and Donoghue to be unattainable. Embracing the public and publicity itself, they took advantage of the shifting mechanics of celebrity to place their writings and, ultimately, themselves, on the rostrum, more than eager to gain literary laurels.

The thesis contributes to the current debate in the fields of adaptation studies and intersemiotic translation. Recent critical stances invite the re-evaluation of the traditional hierarchy which subordinates the target text to its original, and promote a description-oriented textual analysis of a key issue which is common to the texts involved in the adaptation process. By considering the relationship between literature and cinema, the present thesis explores scopophilia, or the love for looking at sexually stimulating scenes, as a key issue in the textual analysis of intersemiotic translation in four significant novels adapted to Italian cinema. Specifically, to put them in the order of the chapters, the thesis analyses scopophilia in Alberto Moravia’s L’uomo che guarda (1985) and the Italian translation of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel La chiave (1956), two literary works adapted to cinema by the Italian director of erotic cinema Tinto Brass (in 1994 and 1983 respectively), and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1350-53), adapted for the screen by Pasolini himself (in 1968 and 1971 respectively). The case studies tackle issues related to adaptation of novels to films, but also issues concerned with the erotic, control and discovery, as well as other psychoanalytic notions which are related to scopophilia (e.g. sexual fetishism, Oedipus complex).

This thesis focuses on the keyword sospiro (‘sigh’) in the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti. It reads this word in relation to the lyric poetry of Occitania and Italy, and medical literature related to lovesickness. It approaches Cavalcanti’s work in this way in order to avoid the distortion of a Dantean lens, as part of a trend since the anniverary of his death in 2000 towards considering Cavalcanti’s work on its own terms. Inspired by Raymond Williams’ Keywords, this thesis looks beyond the familiar presence of sospiro in lyric poetry, revealing a word acting as a locus of innovative expression. It finds that while the sigh is generally regarded as a literary commonplace, it can in fact tell us much about the society and culture in which it is used. Sospiro is then traced in medical literature, charting its evolution as a symptom of the disease of lovesickness. Against this backdrop, a reading of sospiro in Cavalcanti’s poetry is given which argues for the need to listen to both the lyric and medical contexts when interpreting the role of this word. As such, this thesis offers a consideration of these two contexts in parallel, through sospiro, for the first time.

My thesis explores the construction of the New World mythology as it appears in early modern Italian epic poems. It focuses on how Italian writers engage with and contribute to this process of myth-creation; how the newly created mythology relates to the political, social and cultural context of the time; and investigates extent to which it was affected by the personal agendas of the poets. By analysing three New World myths (Brazilian Amazons, Patagonian giants and Canadian pygmies), it provides insights into the perception that Italians had of the newly discovered lands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, as well as providing a greater understanding of the role that early modern Italy had in the ‘invention’ of the Americas. Italian epic poets domesticated New World myths for their own purposes, using written, visual and material sources as an anchor for their agendas. The study of these myths changes, in some cases completely, our reading of the poems. New World myths are at once an exercise in ekphrasis of the maps, cartouches, engravings and collectible objects they derived from, and a record of the impact the Americas had on the early modern Italians.

This thesis explores representations of gender violence in the works of Dacia Maraini, tracing a pathway from early novels in which her protagonists suffer predominantly non-physical oppression, to later works which foreground victims of more extreme bodily violence. Taking a chronological approach, it contextualises her work and situates individual texts in their broader cultural framework, highlighting the changes and continuities that these differing backgrounds have provoked. Maraini’s unique position as both author and social commentator is similarly established, with the interplay of her narrative and feminist commitment emerging as a central concern. Fundamental to the thesis is the figure of the female victim, through whom motifs that are recurrent in Maraini’s oeuvre are identified and analysed. The thesis proposes two main lines of argument. Firstly, that there is a change in the way in which Maraini represents gender violence: from signifying one manifestation of women’s overall oppression under patriarchy, it becomes the dominant theme in a number of texts, presented as a specific phenomenon to be understood and exposed. Secondly, that whilst in many of her early texts her protagonists develop strategies for resisting their abusive situations, Maraini’s later female victims demonstrate little agency and, moreover, appear to submit to the violence they undergo.

This study explores the masochistic aspects of Decadent literature, which to date have been relatively neglected, or have received only sporadic attention as merely the passive forms of sadism, or sadomasochism (Mario Praz). As Jennifer Birkett suggests, Decadent sensibility and sexuality have arguably less affinity with Sade than Sacher-Masoch. Following Birkett, and utilising Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the independence of masochism from sadism and description of the distinctive aesthetic features of masochistic texts, I investigate masochistic formations in French Decadent texts; the work of Jean Lorrain and of Joséphin Péladan. This study also involves a review of relevant writings by Freud and post-Freudian psychoanalysts (Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman); an engagement with current literary-critical scholarship in Decadence (Emily Apter, Charles Bernheimer, Bram Dijkstra and Rita Felski), and in Sacher-Masoch (Nick Mansfield, John K. Noyes, and Anita Phillips), and his influence on Decadent writers.

In this dissertation I focus on the cultural transformations and renewal apparent in the films of Godard, Resnais, Varda and Tati in the period 1954-1968. I contend that the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) – also known as the Algerian War of Independence – contributed to eroding the myth of Résistancialisme and engendered, especially in the generation young enough to be drafted, an initially confused but nevertheless sincere quest for a cause or a Revolution to believe in. This is depicted in the films of Godard, Resnais and Vautier chosen for study here. I also maintain that the aforementioned quest and related cultural, societal and ideological transformations contributed to the events of May 1968. While May 68 is generally considered to have been unforeseen, it was, with hindsight, clearly foreshadowed in the films I have chosen to study. During this period it was not only Algerians but also women who were engaged in a struggle for equality and civil rights, not least of all the right to corporal freedom through fair and legal access to contraception and abortion. Momentous changes in laws governing women and their social status was achieved through sustained challenges to dominant power structures and ideology: therefore, I complement the aforementioned theses by deploying sexual-linguistics and Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva’s challenges to Lacanian psychoanalysis in an analysis of Varda’s films to portray these transformations and argue that women are not excluded from the Logos, but rather can be considered to be the very point of origin of the symbolic order and language itself. Moving towards May 68, I conclude by applying Bakhtin’s theories on the role of laughter and Rabelaisian carnival to four of Jacques Tati’s films of this era, which, I argue, offer representations of a growing collective folk movement and are redolent with the symbolism of historic renewal, therefore also pointing forward to the solidarity and rebellion that typified May 68. Finally, I conclude that the films included in my dissertation, when considered together, have the distinct advantage of portraying an insight into the many momentous cultural and societal transformations taking place in a chapter of modern French history more commonly described as ‘quiet’.

It is undoubtedly one of Kafka's finest erotic scenes – the description of K.'s furtive tryst on the tap-room floor. – Wrapped in Frieda's arms, he rolls back and forth through small puddles of beer and rubbish, her small body burning in his reluctant hands. "Hours passed there," writes Kafka, "hours breathing together with a single heartbeart [gemeinsamen Herzschlags], hours in which K. constantly felt he was lost or had wandered farther into foreign lands [der Fremde] than any human being before him ..." What makes this passage so compelling is the manner in which Kafka, in four short lines, manages to distil everything ambiguous and terrifying about the erotic relation into a scene which, otherwise, could almost pass for sentimental.

This thesis shows to what extent the study of Italian children's literature can benefit from an attentive analysis of the parallel corpus of translated works and of the interaction between the two. The first chapter argues that ignoring translated literature means we are telling only half of the story, since translations have had a strong impact not only on the development, but also on the formation of Italian literature for children. The second chapter disputes the assumed internationalism which suggests children's classics can cross linguistic and cultural boundaries 'naturally', employing research tools offered by Translation Studies: the mechanisms of transfer which can be observed when classics for children move from one culture into another reveal the many changes and adaptations that these books have undergone in order to be accepted in the target cultures, and also their transformation over time within their own source cultures. The third chapter explores links between translation, women's writing and children's literature by looking at the work of a limited number of significant Italian women translators of children's literature, whose contribution to Italian literature is still largely ignored. The historical period of Fascism provides a context for the observation of norms applying to literature for children in the fourth chapter. The idea that children would be much more ideologically pliable than adults led the regime to try to impose on children's books a set of norms conforming to its political aims. Following a broadly chronological line brings us, in the last chapter, to look at the way in which the penetration of innovative literary models and ideas through translation greatly influenced the development of indigenous children's literature in post-war Italy, as well as at the impact of globalisation from the 1980s onwards, both on Italian production and on imported children’s books, their distribution and reception.

This study is concerned with the way in which Racine, particularly through his use of language, dramatises areas of tension inherent in the concept of power. Considering three plays from Racine's middle period (Britannicus, Bajazet and Berenice), Chapter One seeks to uncover the basis of political power. Taking as its starting point the ambivalence underpinning the term legitimacy, Section A examines the foundations of power in the sense of political and moral authority. Section B in turn looks at the implications of these findings for the nature and operation of power, while Section C highlights the discrepancy between real and imagined power, by raising the all-important question as to its locus. Chapter Two takes a fresh look at the relationship between power and love. The ruler/lover dichotomy dramatises both an exterior clash and an interior conflict. We see firstly how the role of ruler impinges upon the role of lover, betraying the transgressive nature of power. However, the examination of the operation of power in a realm where it should not prevail, is ironically confounded by the fact that the political and the erotic are shown to be almost inextricably intertwined. The roles of ruler and lover therefore paradoxically conflict and concord simultaneously. By examining relations between individual characters from the Sartrean perspective of pour autrui, Chapter Three ultimately reveals what the power structure would conceal, that is that those in power are subject to the same cycle of dominance and subservience as those who are not. Section A demonstrates the way in which the familiar acts of thinking and speaking, traditionally perceived as our principal means of positive interaction with others, give rise to conflictual relationships similar to those portrayed three centuries later by Sartre in Huis Clos. Language itself, far from uniting characters, becomes a source of anxiety and discord. Characters find themselves in a bewildering hall of mirrors as speech becomes increasingly deceptive, distorting and concealing the truth. In this way we see how the dit gives way to the tyranny of the non-dit, for like a sinister 'thought police', Racine's protagonists set about capturing and controlling the Other's mind. Section B highlights the development of techniques of manipulation and suppression. The title of this section, Merry-Go-Round, reflects the endless and fruitless struggle to dominate the Other's thought-process.