Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la rose (The Romance of the Rose), written in Paris in the 1270s, presents a vast amount of philosophy and natural science in vernacular poetry, while engaging thoroughly with contemporary, local philosophical and institutional debates. Taking this into consideration, this study investigates how the Rose depends for its meaning on questions around human nature, natural philosophy, and the philosophy of language that were being discussed and debated in the University of Paris at the time of its composition. It suggests a reading of the poem as a work of philosophy that uses Aristotelian ideas of nature and what is natural to present a moral framework – at times explicitly, at times implicitly – within which to assess and critique human behaviour. The concepts of the unnatural and the artificial are used to discuss sin and its effects on sexuality – a key concern of the Rose – and on language. The Rose is shown to present itself as artificial and compromised, yet nevertheless capable of leading imperfect and compromised humans to moral behaviour and towards knowledge which can only ever be imperfect. It is read as a presenting a rhetorical kind of philosophy that is sui generis and that appeals to human desire as well as to the intellect. The specific issue of usury and its relation to avarice is examined, studying contemporary theological and philosophical treatments of the question, in order to illustrate similarities and contrasts in the Rose's theoretical methodology to more orthodox modes of philosophical enquiry. Finally, the poem's valorisation of pleasure and of the perversity inherent in artificial productions is explored to show how poetry, though deviating from the strictures of dialectical language, is nevertheless productive and generative.

This thesis explores the embodied experiences of the rural population in nineteenth-century France. The prevailing historiography has treated rural bodily culture as a cultural survival swept away by ‘modernisation’ in the nineteenth century. By turning to the lives and words of rural labourers and artisans from the Landes de Gascogne, the thesis questions this account, instead showing ways that popular cultures of the body were flexible traditions, adapted by individuals to meet new needs. It does so through a close focus on the stories, songs, and other oral traditions collected by Félix Arnaudin (1844-1921) in the Grande-Lande between around 1870 and 1914. The thesis focuses on the lives of a few of Arnaudin’s 759 folklore informants, showing both how their bodily experiences were changing during this period, and how songs and stories were creative interventions, designed to shape bodily possibilities from below. The thesis draws attention to the surprising shape of rural experiences of the body, which focused on body parts such as the legs and skin for reasons specific to everyday life, while largely ignoring issues that historians might have assumed would be important, such as religion. It argues that the ordinary men and women who performed stories and sang songs were active agents in constructing their own bodies in response to material conditions of physical illness and disability, as well as a changing environment, changing class relations, or changing sexual norms in the Grande-Lande. The thesis presents an emotional and experiential view of rural bodies with a sensitivity to the different experiences of men and women, young and old, poorer and richer, but emphasizes that the body must be seen in the round, as a unifying concern that links together issues of social class, environmental change, sexual relations, work, disability, and religion.

The aim of the present study is to paint an overall picture of how Voltaire interacted with the books that made up his personal library. Situated at the crossroads between history of the book, literary history and literary studies in the standard meaning of the term, it seeks to deepen our understanding of the ways in which Voltaire used his books and of the different types of notes that he left in them. These notes are of course texts in themselves – short ones, to be sure, but texts all the same – and their material, literary and polemical significance have never before been studied in depth. We begin by classifying the marginalia according to the function they seem to have played for Voltaire and, based on their material characteristics, by developing methodologies to analyse these short manuscripts, along with the non-verbal markings that accompany them. An analysis follows of the ways in which Voltaire used the white spaces in his books, then of the links that can be established between the signs of his reading and the genesis of his published works. Finally, we study the poetics of the marginal notes as well as the dynamics at work in the annotated library as a whole. Throughout, Voltaire’s notes and reading habits are placed in the context of the critical literature that has grown up around the subject of marginalia. Along the way, we compare his marginal notes to those of other literary figures of the period, for the subject of this study is clearly the marginalia of a writer, which are necessarily inextricably linked to his principal activity – writing. Indeed, one might speak of an interpenetration, of a blurring of boundaries between reading and writing. Beyond the marks of Voltaire's reading, the study of marginalia raises questions that are relevant for other non-canonical and paratextual materials. To place them in the spotlight transforms their status, and a note that was 'marginal' comes to be considered a text in its own right.

This study traces the intellectual and political itinerary of the review La Relève, an influential cultural journal in 1930s and ‘40s Quebec, in order to explore broader trends within francophone Catholicism in the middle decades of the twentieth century. La Relève enjoyed a unique role as a propagator of French Catholic thought in Quebec due to its close ties with the prominent French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. In the early ‘30s, members of the Relève group espoused a militant Catholicism with conservative-minded nationalist sympathies. The group’s encounter with Maritain in October 1934, however, moved La Relève towards a more communitarian Catholicism which was open to social and religious pluralism. During the later ‘30s, the Relèvistes would display a new interest in democratic forms of politics, reflecting the larger ‘democratic turn’ evident amongst many francophone Catholic intellectuals. In examining this shift, this study argues that the progressive Catholicism embraced by La Relève remained strongly rooted in longstanding Catholic social teachings and mentalities, thereby shedding light upon the political trajectory of the larger French Catholic Revival during this period. The emergence of a ‘Left’ Catholicism in France and Quebec was the result of a gradual and often contradictory process in which new attempts to engage with pluralism, democracy and human rights were heavily influenced by the traditionally anti-liberal and anti-individualistic perspectives of Catholic social and political thought. This study also examines the social and cultural environment of Catholic intellectual engagement in Quebec during this period, focusing upon the role played by friendship in defining the experiences of the Relève circle during the 1930s and ‘40s. Initially the product of a close-knit and often cliquish group of former schoolmates, La Relève provided a forum for masculine solidarity and shared intellectual and religious pursuits. The Relèvistes' conception of friendship expanded over the course of the decade, reflecting their exposure to the ideas of the French Catholic intelligentsia, for whom the idea of friendship signalled a wider community bound together by common religious, social and political goals. During the war years, the Relève group came to play a new role within the larger francophone Catholic intellectual community, founding a publishing company which printed numerous anti-fascist Catholic authors. In the postwar period, however, contact with the European intellectual milieu diminished, as the review closed in 1948 and the Relèvistes embraced new trends in Catholic thought which ultimately distanced them from Maritain. However, intellectual engagement with French Catholic thought would continue on in Quebec through the review Cité libre, which would play an important role in shaping politics and society in Quebec and Canada during the later twentieth century.

This thesis investigates the relations between romance and texts of religious instruction in England between c.1170–c.1330, taking as its principal textual corpus the exceptionally rich literary traditions of insular French romance and religious writing that subsist during this period. It argues that romance is a mode which engages closely with religious and ethical questions from a very early stage, and demonstrates the discourses of opposition in which both kinds of text participate throughout the period. The thesis offers substantial readings of a number of neglected insular French religious texts of the thirteenth century, including Robert Grosseteste's Chasteau d'Amour, John of Howden's Rossignos, and Robert of Gretham's Miroir, alongside new readings of romances such as Gui de Warewic and Ipomedon. This juxtaposition of romance narrative and religious instruction sheds new light onto both kinds of text: romance emerges as a mode with deep-rooted didactic qualities; insular French religious literature is shown to be intensely concerned with the need to compete with romance’s entertaining appeal in literary culture. This oppositional discourse profoundly affects the form of instructional writing and romance alike. The discussion of the interactions between insular French romance and instructional literature presented here also serves as a new pre-history of Middle English romance. The final chapter of the thesis offers several new readings of texts from the Auchinleck manuscript, including the canonical romance Sir Orfeo and the neglected, puzzling Speculum Gy de Warewyk. These readings demonstrate that fourteenthcentury romance intelligently adapts the material it inherits from Francophone literature to a new cultural situation. In these acts of reformation, Middle English romance reveals itself as a discursive space capable of accommodating a wide range of ethical and ideological affiliations; the complex negotiations between romance and instructional literature in the preceding centuries are an important cultural condition for this widening of possibilities.

This thesis considers the burlesque literary forms in the work of the seventeenth-century writer, Cyrano de Bergerac. It challenges current scholarship by looking beyond libertinism to consider the importance of Cyrano's comic writing practices. While it does not deny the philosophical and scientific focus of Cyrano's oeuvre, it suggests that the burlesque is a defining characteristic. By taking into account the literary context in which Cyrano was writing – notably the querelle des Lettres and the rise of the histoire comique – as well as looking at other comic writers that could have influenced Cyrano, and through close textual readings, this thesis reveals that burlesque forms are often used in excess in Cyrano's work – forms compete against forms – producing destructive effects; burlesque forms can, in effect, be self-defeating. This project then asks whether it is possible to consider Cyrano a comic writer at all. It does demonstrate, however, that, in ridiculing everyone and everything, Cyrano too makes a mockery of the very idea of a dissimulative text. In questioning the literary gesture that Cyrano makes through his battling burlesque forms, this thesis suggests that libertinism can appear to be one of many playful masks the author assumes in his work. Is Cyrano a burlesque libertine? If so, this thesis raises the wider question of whether there are other imposters within the ranks.

The heterogeneous field of posthuman theory allows for an account of community under the convergence of late capitalism and high technology and its spread to a global scale. Spanning bioconservative fears of a potential loss of agency and a human ‘essence’ through advances in technology, ‘transhumanist’ hopes for a biological transformation that would fulfil liberal goals for human development, as well as postmodern, feminist interpretations of the posthuman as instantiating a liberating break with liberal ideology and patriarchal structures, theories of the posthuman offer a productive starting point for exploring the transformations in understandings of human subjectivity and community at the turn of the twenty-first century. Placing the concept of community against a background of past totalitarianism and a possible future of an uncontested globalised neoliberal regime that high technology risks intensifying, the present study enquires into the possibility of a community that would escape the metaphysical logic of mastery subtending both past and present models of community and suggests that problematizing representations of the creation of what a strand in contemporary philosophy terms a non-totalising ‘communauté désoeuvrée’ and implicit proposals not for the revival of community as a teleological ‘oeuvre’, but for its rewriting may be found in works by Maurice G. Dantec, Michel Houellebec, and Antoine Volodine, works which have been labelled posthuman themselves by virtue of their incorporation of posthuman themes or structures that come in the shape of representations and problematisations of high technology and its intersection with late capitalism and narrative structures that mimic or subvert conceptions of subjectivity that can loosely be termed posthuman. These novelists write in a context of an ideological, technological, and commercial constraint that hampers literary and political agency and which is problematized both implicitly and explicitly in the use these writers make of representations of violence and literary strategies such as irony, ambiguity, and hermeticism. These representations and strategies, it will be suggested, could be read as subtle attempts to bypass those constraints and restore the potential of literary production to comment on and even intervene in the creation of community in a posthuman age.

This thesis examines Bonnefoy’s cultivation of the performative aspects of the poetic act in his later collections of poetry. It investigates the poet’s use of the theatrical structures of poetic performance, their temporal and spatial dynamics, to deconstruct conceptual or representative modes of thought. It examines how Bonnefoy uses apostrophes to insentient phenomena and addresses to an unidentified other in his attempts to open language up to the finitude and sharing of existence. Working within language, against language, the poet cultivates what he describes as ‘un savoir, tout négatif et instable qu’il soit, que je puis peut-être nommer la vérité de la parole’. The first chapter of this thesis investigates how the image of the ephemeral flame becomes a model for a finite poetic performance in ‘La Terre’. The second chapter scrutinises how Bonnefoy makes the signifying function of language ‘passive’ to the inappropriable excess of material presence in Début et fin de la neige. The third chapter, analysing ‘La Voix lointaine’, explores how Bonnefoy dramatises the experience of self-presence as the act of listening to a distant voice. The fourth chapter, investigating the relationship between finitude and form in ‘L’Heure présente’, analyses how the dissolution of form gives rise to a form that is always à venir, a dynamic, ‘un possible’.

Jean Froissart’s Chroniques, composed of four Books, relate the first stages of the Anglo-French conflict later known as the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). This thesis explores Froissart’s textual journey(s) to Gascon lands (south-west of modern-day France) and history/stories. Relying on Gérard Genette’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative theories, it uses literary and narratological tools to analyse three passages from Book I and III concerned with Gascony: the Earl of Derby’s Gascon campaigns (Chapter 1); the Black Prince’s Gascon campaigns and the principality of Aquitaine (Chapter 2); Froissart’s personal journey to and stay at the court of Gaston Fébus, count of Foix-Béarn (Chapter 3). One aim of the study is to investigate the representation of the region but it also argues that the Gascon passages have wider implications for the Chroniques, Froissart’s work as a whole, and the writing of history in the fourteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, Froissart’s ‘history’ was often disparagingly discussed by scholars due to factual inaccuracy and literary embellishments: such a ‘historical narrative’, it was felt, fell short of history and was nothing more than an entertaining story presenting outdated chivalric ideals. Although this approach has been partly revised, some critics still view the Chroniques’ earlier Books as being a narratively straightforward reflection of such a chivalric ideology, lacking critical hindsight on fourteenth-century events and society, and thus presenting paradoxical and irreconcilable tensions with later Books to the extent that they are occasionally deemed to be an entirely different kind of work than their later counterparts. The narrative thread of Froissart’s Gascon (hi)story explored here allows the revision of such views and shows that Froissart’s narrative is far from narratively and ideologically straightforward. This complexity is present as early as the first versions of the Book I, which should be envisaged in parallel, not in opposition, with the ‘later’ Chroniques. Similarly, the various tensions (e.g. fiction/history; ideal/real) underpinning the whole work, manifested in the portrayal of Gascony/the Gascons, are best approached in terms of co-existence, not antagonism. Such a multi-faceted work (a mirror and/or product of the fourteenth century?), à mi-chemin between history and fiction, between conflicting yet co-existing perspectives, is precisely what makes Froissart’s Chroniques valuable to literary critics, philologists, and historians alike.

Scholarly attention to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French art has focused on the importance that Johann Joachim Winckelmann attributed to the male nude figure in his definition of ideal beauty, and the impact of his work on debates over the 'beau idéal' in French art and art criticism. In contrast, Winckelmann's extensive interest in the detail of ancient costume, the folds of drapery, and the teleological and aesthetic significance that he ascribed to them, has been underplayed. The role played by costume and drapery as components of the 'beau idéal' in French art and aesthetics has also not been fully explored. This thesis examines the way in which costume and drapery formed an important component and embodiment of ideal beauty in the work of Winckelmann and in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French artistic circles, providing new insights into the arguments over the meanings of Truth, Beauty and Nature in this period. The thesis proposes that ideal beauty in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century France was conveyed in works of art through the accurate rendering of costume and the expressive qualities of drapery in combination with the perfect form and contour of the nude body. The first part of the thesis sets up a proposition that costume and drapery formed part of the definition of ideal beauty in the work of Winckelmann. Highlighting the significance of Winckelmann's work on costume and drapery in French art theory, it demonstrates how the definition of ideal beauty in France also incorporated the accurate rendering of costume and the aesthetic impact of drapery. In demonstrating the significance of costume and drapery to both Winckelmann and French theorists it is proposed that the application of a meta-historical approach of costume and drapery to French art theory can provide new understandings and readings of the definition of ideal beauty, the hierarchy of the genres and the broader aesthetic concerns of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century French art. The second part of the thesis applies the proposed hermeneutic of costume and drapery to a small selection of theoretical work on the nature of ideal beauty and on a significant collection of Salon criticism. With this approach to the primary material this thesis demonstrates how French artists were able to express the 'beau idéal' within the traditional academic conventions and hierarchies, and negotiate the sense of public unease over the use of nudity in contemporary art.