This thesis on literary writing consists of a critic and of a fiction. / The critic entitled Fragments, attempts to bring out the characteristics of fragmentary writing. The theoretic analysis concerns the generic problematic of such writing and its effects on lecture. The last part of the text is devoted to the social context in which the fragmentary writing takes place. / The creation Breves contents fourteen short stories. Representing different generations, the characters of Breves are seized in a particular moment of thier lives. Most of the characters are part of a couple; nevertheless, they cannot get away from loneliness.

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Inaug.-diss.--Zürich. / Lebenslauf. Issued also as Schweizer anglistische Arbeiten. Bd. 15. "Literatur": p. 87-89.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 213-216).

“Unhappy Endings” explores dynamics of novelistic closure by examining Victorian texts that come to a halt in a way that invites subsequent continuation. Each chapter of this dissertation confronts a different fact pattern: a different kind of incompletion and subsequent continuation. “Unhappy Endings” investigates texts left explicitly unfinished, texts left ambiguously unfinished, the impact of the Victorian serial form on the concept of “finishedness,” and the perceived kinds of finishedness, of a text. These Victorian texts that question the concept of finishedness are taken up and continued in several different ways: continued by the original author, by an author’s family member, by an editor or publisher, by some other author or writer, or even by the reader-public. Thus, as the factual circumstances that create the “unfinished” and “continued” status of my exemplar texts vary from chapter to chapter, the working standard for what qualifies as “unfinished” and “continued” necessarily alters accordingly. The following questions are inherent in my focus here on continuation and completion: What is an ending? What is “whole”? What makes a whole complete? Must a novel have a discernible ending to be complete? To be a whole? What can we learn when a novel, abandoned for whatever reason by one author, is “continued” and completed by another author? I use close reading, digital humanities, and biographical criticism to identify the ways that literature of the Victorian era was, and still is, particularly susceptible to continuation. This continued susceptibility paves the way, perhaps, for Victorian literature’s sustained impact on modern literature and media.

This doctoral thesis analyses the evolution of responses to Jane Austen's fiction through continuations of her unfinished novel The Watsons (c.1803-5). Although the first full “appropriation” of an Austen novel ever published was a continuation of The Watsons and a total of eight completions appeared between 1850 and 2008, little research has been done to link the afterlife of The Watsons and changing perceptions of Austen. This thesis argues that the completions of The Watsons significantly illuminate Austen's reception: they expose conflicting readings of Austen's novels through textual negotiations between the completer's and Austen's voice. My study begins by examining how the first continuation, Catherine Hubback's The Younger Sister (1850), implies an alternative image of the Victorian Austen to that propounded by James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen's first official biographer (Chapter 1). The next two chapters focus on the effects of World War I and II on modes of reading Austen. Through L. Oulton's (1923), Edith Brown's (1928) and John Coates's (1958) completions of The Watsons, this study examines the connection between Austen's fiction and different notions of Englishness, politics and the nation. Chapter Four addresses the contribution of the 1990s completions to the debate over Austen's feminism. Finally, Chapter Five analyses recent trends in Austenalia, which thwart the production of successful completions of The Watsons. My thesis presents the first substantial analysis of this body of work.