Thesis (Ph. D.)--Université de Paris III, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 492-510) and indexes.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Université de Paris III, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 492-510) and indexes.

Maupassant's writings suggest that the monde, demi-monde and brothels, usually conceived as entirely different universes, resemble each other. They are imperfect copies, which can be mistaken for one another. The characters moving in these worlds are essentially false, hypocritical and superficial beings, prisoners of a role which forces them to play a comedy in society. Some adopt to perfection the values and conventions attached to their role, to the extent of no longer differentiating the true from the false, and forgetting their identity. / As the distinction between appearances and reality disappears, the boundaries between the milieux become unclear. Do they exist? Have the boundaries arbitrarily been drawn to preserve social order? If Maupassant implicitly asks these questions, he does not provide an answer. His attitude towards social comedy is rather ambiguous. Though he makes fun of the latter, emphasizing its absurdity and ridicule, he does not condemn it. Spectator and actor of this vast comedy, Maupassant stays detached: of course life is only a game, but why not play it?

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 252-264). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

The creation of the French Penal Code of 1791, which failed to address the legality of prostitution, and the social climate of nineteenth-century France led to the rapid development of sexual commerce. The spread of syphilitic diseases soon became a serious crisis, and the fault of the spread of syphilis and disease was quickly ascribed to purchasable women. Other social crises of the time, such as problems with sewage and the spread of disease and decay also came to be associated with prostitution. My thesis will examine ways in which male artists of the time used literature and painting to suppress the contagious, transgressive sexual female, and the ways in which the representation of this female illustrates deeper anxieties and fears of the French bourgeois society about class and gender. I have constructed my argument in the context of two literary/artistic prostitute figures: the “heart of gold” and the “man-eater.” The “heart of gold” is characterized as a prostitute with qualities of goodness and integrity, who must ultimately die as the only way to reconcile her deviant behavior. The “man-eater,” by contrast, is a woman who destroys the men who seek her, driving them to financial, emotional, and even physical devastation. In order to complete my thesis, I have used a selection of primary sources (the works of Balzac, Dumas fils, Maupassant, Flaubert, and Manet), analyses of nineteenth-century French literature, and several historical sources, as well as the memoirs of Céleste Mogador, a courtesan in nineteenth-century France. The goal of my thesis is to examine the two literary figures mentioned above in the context of gender relations and power, the spread of disease, and decay and degeneration.

Many American novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discuss prostitution. Some works like Reginald Wright Kauffman's The House of Bondage, (1910) exaggerate the threat of "white slavery," but others like David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) more honestly depict the harsh conditions which caused many women to prostitute themselves for survival. Contemporary critical interpretations of novels addressed in this dissertation began before major shifts in women's roles in the workplace, before trends towards family planning, before women could respectably live on their own, and especially before women won the right to vote. Yet, a century of progress later, this vestigal criticism still influences our study of these texts.Relying on primary source materials such as prostitute autobiographies and vice commission reports, I compare fictional representations of prostitution to historical data, focusing on the prostitute's voice and her position in society. I examine actual prostitutes' life stories to dispel the misconception that prostitution was always a lower-class business. My chapters are ordered in regards to the prominence of the prostitute characters' voices: in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) the heroine seldom speaks for herself; in two Socialist novels--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) and Estelle Baker's The Rose Door (1911)--prostitutes debate low wages, political corruption, and organized vice; and in Phillips's Susan Lenox, the title character is almost always allowed to speak for herself, and readers can see what she is thinking as well as doing. As my chapters progress, I demonstrate how the fictions become more like the prostitutes' own autobiographies, with self-reliant women telling their stories without shame or remorse. My conclusion, "Revamping `Fallen Women' Pedagogy for Teaching American Literature," suggests how social history and textual scholarship of specific "fallen women" novels should affect our teaching of these texts. / Department of English

Thesis (M.A.) University of Missouri-Columbia, 2006. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on August 21, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of History, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 312-336).