This study aims to establish whether the performance or reception of a ‘theatre of resistance’ was possible amid the abundant and popular literary theatre seen during the Occupation of France (1940-1944). Playwrights and critics have made bold claims for five plays that allegedly conveyed hostility towards the occupier or somehow encouraged the French Resistance movement. These premieres will be scrutinised by examining the plays’ scripts, the circumstances surrounding their composition, the acquisition of a performance visa, public reactions and critics’ interpretations from before and after the Liberation of August 1944. I intend to demonstrate that the extreme circumstances of war-torn Paris were largely responsible for the classification of these complex works and their authors as either pro-Resistance or pro-Collaboration, a binary opposition I will challenge. While it is understandable that certain lines or themes took on special relevance, writers would not risk attracting the attention of the German or Vichy authorities. Mythical or historical subject material was (deliberately) far removed from the situation of 1940s audiences, yet was presented in the form of ‘new’ tragedies that resonated with their preoccupations. Individual testimony confirms that certain plays provided a morale boost by reaffirming hope in the future of France.

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This thesis examines constructions of corporeality in three novels by the Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda: El carrer de les Camèlies (1966), Mirall trencat (1974) and La mort i la primavera (1986), and the short stories: ‘Aquella paret, aquella mimosa’, ‘Una fulla de gerani blanc’ and ‘La meva Cristina’. The study is concerned with locating the author’s formulations of the body in relation to the Catalan socio-historical context and argues that by rendering corporeal representation problematic Rodoreda enters into dialogue with Catalonia’s own historical past, often challenging culturally specific social, sexual, political and aesthetic precepts. The thesis primarily draws on visual and spectatorship theory, urban and spatial studies and feminist analyses in order to explore the idea of the politically, culturally and gender coded body as limit or border. It covers four main areas of analysis: the idea of the body as surface, image and texture and the practices of viewing that objectify the body; the relationship between the body and domestic and urban space; the culturally and politically constructed body as limit; and the concept of the abject or open body which in Rodoreda’s literature is often the consequence of either social, visual or physical violence.

The work examines the interweavement of individual memory and historical past in Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone, arguing that the genre of this ‘non-book’ can be identified with the ancient Greek notion of hypomnēmaton. The first section reads the Zibaldone as an answer to the so called ‘second printing revolution’, examining the text as the outcome of tension between the ‘library’ and Leopardi’s own writing. The second section analyses Leopardi’s use of quotations through the case study of Montesquieu’s presence in the Zibaldone, highlighting how quotations from Montesquieu shape Leopardi’s reflection on the fracture between antiquity and modernity and on the aesthetic problem of grace. The third section moves from the poem ‘Le Ricordanze’ (1829), showing how the questions challenged in the Zibaldone from a theoretical point of view (such as the relationship between individual memory and historical past, the notion of grace and the problem of making culture after the Enlightenment) are finally embodied in Leopardi’s return to poetry of 1828-29, which makes the Zibaldone-hypomnēmaton unnecessary. ‘Le Ricordanze’ stages an unmediated return of memory (mnēme) through which the hypomnēmaton is ultimately emptied of significance.

This dissertation looks at the thematic and narrative tensions that emerge when certain prominent late eighteenth-century French epistolary novels deal with the issue of women's education and the possibility of its reform. The debate of the latter half of the century is firmly centered on Rousseau, who wrote both a best-selling epistolary novel dealing with the position of women in society (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse) and a controversial pedagogical treatise that suggests sweeping changes to male education but decisively anchors women within a limited domestic sphere (Émile). More specifically, I have examined the ways in which Rousseau's contradictory and problematic discussion of female pedagogy enacts narrative structures of tension and hesitation within both the treatise and the epistolary novel. Both texts, as well as the unfinished epistolary sequel Émile et Sophie, ou Les solitaires are destabilized by the fraught question of how to educate women. The contradictions engendered by attempts to maintain strict gender difference also plague Laclos' pedagogical treatises and his epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, which simultaneously offer revolution, reform, and rejection of female education. The Marquis de Sade subsequently approaches this topic with humor, choosing to imitate the excesses of Enlightenment discourse on female pedagogy, in turn creating a potentially instructive parody of his own. Finally, Isabelle de Charrière ponders the topic of women's education in a variety of non-fiction and literary works, which all reveal her cautious strategies of disguise and ambivalence when addressing such a hotly debated issue, especially from the point of view of a woman writer. Examining both the theoretical and fictional works of Rousseau, Laclos, Sade, and Charrière, I prove that the convergence of epistolarity and female pedagogy was far from accidental, and that the tensions inherent in Enlightenment thought on gender are in fact mirrored in the narrative permutations and problematics of the epistolary novel.

This dissertation addresses the emergence and proliferation of plays about convents, a French revolutionary subgenre based on the representation of monastic costume, setting, and characters. In the Old Regime, the theatrical representation of Roman Catholic clerics and garb was prohibited from the public theater. After 1789, however, societal norms surrounding the treatment of religious objects were radically transformed. The collapse of the Old Regime system of censorship and the nationalization of Church property helped trigger a flood of plays that depicted clerics on stage before live audiences. The convent play is perhaps the best example of how the freedom to represent the Roman Catholic clergy impacted dramatic practice of the revolutionary period. Unprecedented on stage prior to 1790, and all but absent from playhouses with the return of censorship in the First Empire, convent plays remained constant if controversial staples of most playhouses during their brief but prolific existence. Despite their differences, farces, dramas, tragedies, comedies, and operettas about convent life constitute, in my view, a single genre. They all combined fictional sources and contemporary events with pre-existing theatrical codes in order to create new, gendered narratives of secularization. Convent plays overwhelmingly ended with a nun's decision to leave the convent in order to marry a patriot. I suggest that this dramatic conclusion was socially and historically specific to the republican gender ideology of the French Revolution. In the face of the ongoing defamation of real-life nuns, their fictional doubles underwent secular conversions in the theaters, and thereby incorporated the sacred pillars of chastity, obedience, and poverty into Republican parables of wifely valor. The convent play, a precursor of romantic theater, both reflected and advanced the new social order outside the playhouse, where civil authority replaced the divine right of kings.

Collecting, as it was practiced in the 1880s, meant cultivating a comforting and busy, but also disorienting and disconcerting domestic, and mental, interior. This study examines how this meaning was developed in French literature at the end of the 19th century. I consider how collecting investigates the self, exercises the powers of the mind, inquires into the individual's relationship to society and to texts. The study takes, as its point of departure, comments about the cultural significance of collecting, as a widespread taste for domestic interiors filled with objects, made by Paul Bourget and Edmond de Goncourt, two writers of the 1880s. I then focus on fictional texts from the 1880s by J.-K. Huysmans and Pierre Loti, who, more than any other writers at the end of the 19th century, depict collecting as an earnest activity of self-exploration. The specific collections involved are Huysmans' protagonist's whimsically decorated house outside of Paris, Loti's protagonist's collection of Japanese objects in Japan, Loti's protagonist's floating museum on board his ship, and the author Loti's home museum in Rochefort. Through close readings of my two texts--paying attention to repeated words, descriptions, imagery, figurative language, ironies, contradictions, juxtapositions, ambiguities, tone and intertextual references, textual form and structure--I analyze how collecting is a process of defining the self, an apprentissage. The arc of my study draws its inspiration from the theme of collecting itself. From the self and mind of the collector, I proceed to examine how he organizes space, to how he interacts with other people, to how he approaches literature. Huysmans and Loti prefigure the modernist turn toward the superfluousness of objects, insofar as the collector's elaborate reflection on his objects dominates the two texts discussed in this study, A Rebours (1884) and Madame Chrysanthème (1887). As the collector comes to be at home with objects, objects become, increasingly, catalysts for inner mental exploration. Yet the collected objects of des Esseintes and Loti are still, often, special and rare; these characters are not yet exulting in the trivial, universally available object, as later modernists will do. In Huysmans and Loti, there is still great faith in material objects and the artful arrangement of them to satisfy desires, to be the answer to the quest, to fill the lack, to lead one inward, to solve problems. Already, by the end of the 1880s, the window of earnest self-exploration through collecting, as exemplified by Huysmans and Loti, will close. In Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which became well-known and widely read in France at the time of its publication, collecting in Wilde's text becomes implicated in hiding the truth of oneself. In Huysmans' and Loti's depictions of collecting art, art objects and other elements, there is, in contrast, a sense of profitable, fruitful exploration of self, rather than a fear of self-exploration. The collecting they portray is a way of coming to be at home in one's own mind--seeking not originality but simply the articulation of one's own perspective.

This dissertation analyzes the central place that representations of secret societies and conspiracies occupied in literature in France in between the two World Wars, reappearing in various guises in works by authors across aesthetic and ideological traditions. My examination situates these literary representations within their political and social context, demonstrating that the instability of the French Third Republic created an atmosphere that contributed to a proliferation of conspiracy theories targeting every faction imaginable, from right-wing and leftist groups to Freemasons, Jesuits, and Jews. Serving as both the subject of fictional works and the object of critical study, the figure of the secret society allowed authors to position themselves and their texts within this context of uncertainty and suspicion. The representation of conspiracies and secret societies permitted authors as varied as Jules Romains, André Malraux, Céline, and Paul Nizan to participate in and shape a widespread reevaluation of the political order by critiquing a dysfunctional system of parliamentary democracy and highlighting the cultural tensions of the day. My thesis does not just read these texts as reflections of larger political and cultural debates; it argues that secret societies and conspiracies served a specific literary function, particularly concerning the evolution of the avant-garde and the ideological novel in the interwar years. The invocation of these groups provided a charged metaphor for defining literary techniques and concerns of audience, genre, and language; and their representation helped shape the form and practice of interwar literature. I show, ultimately, how conspiracies and secret societies in literature participated in a larger discourse of fear and suspicion that heralded the decline of the avant-garde, the rise of the committed novel, and a growing literary interest in politics, ethnology, and sociology.

Engaging with a variety of literary and historical sources, in both prose and verse, including letters, chronicles, treaties and the neo-Latin epic, this dissertation examines the centrality of the classically-informed, philosophical idea of friendship (amicitia) in the community-building discourse of Francesco Petrarca's Italy. The first chapter examines Petrarch's treatment of Scipio Africanus as humanistic leader and idealized friend in the Africa. The second chapter proposes a reading of Cola di Rienzo as the first "political Petrarchist" and contextualizes his epistolary campaign to unify mid-fourteenth century Italy. The third chapter explores Petrarch's politics of familiaritas in the letters he addressed to leaders of prominent Italian city-states attempting to reconcile old friends. This study presents an analysis of the rhetorical strategies underlying Petrarch's career as public intellectual, diplomat and poet.

This dissertation investigates the emergence of the memoir genre in France. Commynes, the author generally regarded as the first memoirist, initially conceived his memoirs as a collection of personal notes to be used by Angelo Cato for a more elaborate history of Louis XI’s reign, but gradually came to consider it an independent, firsthand account. The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed the appearance of an unprecedented and closely-knit group of firsthand historical narratives, circulating in manuscript form or published as memoirs. These texts were responding to the standards set by a new Renaissance historiography, which sought to transform traditional history into a science with political applications. As the early modern paradigm of historiography based on firsthand narrative sources faded away in modern times, memoirs lost their historiographical status and became part of French literature. Most scholars deem Renaissance memoirs rudimentary forms of autobiography that only fully matured in the age of Louis XIV. It is within and against this teleological literary scholarship that my thesis is situated. By re-placing Renaissance memoirs within their original rhetorical context, I argue that the author’s quest for individual self-expression, which has been considered a defining characteristic of memoirs, is an anachronistic and retrospective projection. My dissertation shows that memoirs were originally a collective enterprise and that communal values prevailed in Renaissance self-memorialization. The first formal group of memoirs appeared in the wake of civil and religious wars that endangered traditional forms of social and political representation. Their authors addressed relatively new topics such as the court favorite, reason of state, and national unity. However, all the evidence suggests that their life-writings did not mark a watershed between medieval corporatism and Renaissance individualism, as has been previously thought.