In nineteenth-century literary studies and histories, Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) is still largely remembered as the instigator of the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake, mostly because of his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) and its controversial preface. This recognition is usually accompanied by a retrospective appreciation of Gautier's work in light of the more famous authors who succeeded him and developed some of the precepts of the doctrine, such as Baudelaire. This thesis is a comparative study of Gautier and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) as the two main exponents of the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake respectively in France and Britain. While comparisons between Gautier and Baudelaire have tended to highlight the superiority of the latter, a comparison with Wilde allows Gautier to be seen and understood in his own terms, and simultaneously casts a new light on Wilde's contribution to the development of the doctrine. My study is the first to examine the works of the two authors comparatively from the vantage point of their aesthetic theories. I argue that in order better to assess their contribution, it is necessary to start with an analysis of their experimentations with literary form. The overall aim of the thesis is to re-evaluate their fictional works which, as a result of their commitment to the doctrine, are often seen as lacking in depth and content, and as being too descriptive and decorative. The central argument is that the very decorative form of their works should be seen as the starting point of an ambitious reflection on literature, its aims and its relation to other artistic media, the visual arts in particular.

Often overlooked, yet still a significant and visible social code, jewelry and its symbolic power are barely analyzed in literary criticism. In this thesis, by tracing jewelry's various functions and representations throughout the 19th century, one discovers its ability to also blur and reinforce boundaries that so typifies the tensions and redefinitions happening throughout this era. With the rise of the bourgeoisie and industrial production, jewelry became more available to the masses than it ever had before. Its transformation occurred alongside the newfound desire for women to be seen, perhaps as a direct result of patriarchal society's attempt to relegate them to the private sphere where they were to carry out their domestic duties. For women, the beginning of the century marked itself as an "[époque] stricte, corsetée, guindée et protégée," the fin-de-siècle was an era that promoted the sensual liberation for women whose existence had been relegated to the private sphere to perform only domestic duties (Coupeau 85). Thus, by tracing jewelry's representation in the 19th century, I unveil how women broke through social restrictions by transforming their literal chains of submission and esclavage into pieces of adornment that brandished their desire to be seen, to be liberated, to be desired. / Master of Arts / Jewelry and its symbolic power are barely analyzed in literary criticism. In this thesis, by tracing jewelry's various functions and representations throughout the 19th-century, one discovers its ability to also blur and reinforce boundaries that so typifies the tensions and redefinitions happening throughout this era. With the rise of the bourgeoisie and industrial production, jewelry became more available to the masses than it ever had before. For women, the beginning of the century marked itself as a period of restrictions and protection while the fin-de-siècle promoted the sensual liberation for women whose existence had been relegated to the home to carry out their domestic duties (Coupeau 85). Thus, by tracing jewelry's representation in the 19th century, I unveil how women broke through social restrictions by transforming their literal chains of submission and esclavage into pieces of adornment that brandished their desire to be seen, to be liberated, to be desired.

This thesis provides a contextualised exegesis and re-evaluation of the anarchist Pierre- Joseph Proudhon's writings on war and peace. The thesis has two claims to originality. The first lies in shedding new light on Proudhon's voluminous writings on international politics. These texts have been relatively marginalised in the broader secondary literature on Proudhon's thinking, and the thesis seeks to correct this important lacuna. In International Relations (IR), the academic discipline to which this thesis will make its most obvious original contribution, Proudhon's writings on war and peace have been almost completely ignored. By providing an anarchist approach to world politics, the thesis will also contribute to IR's historiographical and critical theoretical literature. The second claim to originality lies in using these writings and the context from which they emerged to tell a story about the evolution of the nineteenth century, the origins of the twentieth century and provide possible ways of thinking beyond the twenty first. The thesis employs a contextualist methodology that works in four ways. First, I have contextualised Proudhon's thought geo-politically, in relation to the dynamics of the balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe. Secondly, I have sought to understand Proudhon's ideas against the backdrop of the evolution of the French nation state in the mid to late nineteenth century. Third, I have shown how Proudhon's thought emerges out of the dominant intellectual currents of his day – ideas that range from the inspiration for the activism of Fourierist and Saint-Simonian feminists, to the epochal influence of Rousseau and Kant. Finally, I argue that Proudhon's thinking on world politics needs to be understood in relation to the evolution of his own thinking after Napoleon III's coup d'état of the 2nd of December 1851. I will show that Proudhon's mature anarchism, his mutualist federalism, was an engaged response to each of these social and intellectual contexts. I will argue that his critiques of these processes, and their intellectual champions, have been given an added poignancy given that he campaigned in large part against those very processes that culminated in two world wars.

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.

This thesis explores the representation of conspiracy in the literature of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its engagement with conspiracy thinking, with particular reference to the work of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and George Sand (1804-1876). In providing the first sustained scholarly exploration of conspiracy and cultural production in nineteenth-century France, it situates the novel within wider discourses on European political history in the years leading up to the upheaval of 1848. Through close readings of Balzac and Sand's common investment in conspiracist modes of explanation, this study makes the case for a new generic category, the novel of conspiracy, around which literary poetics, historical imagination and political fantasy come to coalesce. Chapter one proposes a re-evaluation of the dialectic between models of surface and depth reading in Balzac's Une ténébreuse affaire (1841), arguing that the conspiratorial landscape of this proto-detective novel belies Balzac's fraught relationship to the severed referentiality of his narrative. As illustration of a Balzacian poetics of conspiracy, Une ténébreuse affaire, it is suggested, points forward in literary history towards the Flaubertian aesthetic of platitude. Chapter two looks to the political criticisms Jacques Rancière makes of Sand's patrician benevolence to inform its reading of Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840), which depicts workers' secret societies and the underground networks of Restoration liberalism. Accusations of misguided idealism, this thesis shows, align Rancière's critique and the literary-critical narrative informing Sand's twentieth-century aesthetic devaluation with the reproach that she herself levels at the Carbonarist conspirators of her novel. Chapter three, finally, turns to the alternative origin myth of 1789 that Sand elaborates in Consuelo-La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842-44). Her engagement with the founding text of the conspiracist tradition of explanation, it argues, provides the cornerstone for the interrogation of the tensions of a pre-Revolutionary Europe torn between Enlightenment and Illuminism. Framing the Balzacian and Sandian novel as emblematic of a wider discourse on the conspiratorial origins of 1789 has a two-fold advantage. On an immediate level, it nuances received critical ideas on these authors' relationships to history and literary genre (a realist Balzac incapable of looking back further than the Restoration whose demise he so lamented; an idealist Sand too caught up in a utopian future to envisage the historical past). In doing so, this study seeks to problematize the narrative of oppositionality behind the Balzac-Sand binary in terms of which the literary history of nineteenth-century France is habitually couched. Yet, more significantly, it also gestures towards the importance of the conspiratorial as a prism through which to approach the porosity of the very categories of 'literature' and 'history' in the nineteenth-century French context.

In this study, I explore four representations of the Devil as a fallen angel in nineteenth century France in order to better understand the way in which the artists at this time used the symbol of the Devil to express their viewpoints on the various social, political and cultural changes in France. In the first chapter, I provide a survey of the artistic development of the Devil, from his angelic roots in the Old Testament to his near disappearance during the Enlightenment. I examine the semantic difficulties when discussing the Devil, as well as the current literature on his philosophical, theological and cultural significance. The second chapter is dedicated to an in-depth analysis of the four works in which I situate the image within the artist’s larger body of work and then examine the physical representation of the Devil, the landscape in which he is found and the transitory moment of the fall depicted. In the third chapter I provide a historical context for these representations and demonstrate the way in which they reflect the political and cultural agitation in France at the time due to the multiple revolutions, changes in governing structure and advances in science and technology. Through this exploration of these four representations, I propose that the Devil provides unique insight as to the ongoing artistic conceptualisation and perceptions of the state of humanity in an increasingly modern world. / Graduate / walkerem@uvic.ca

My project offers a set of comparative close readings of texts by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Honoré de Balzac. Balzac’s early fiction, I contend, grapples with questions relating to the representational practice of mimesis through an explicit engagement with Hoffmann’s work. Hoffmann’s fiction, in turn, proves itself repeatedly to contain the traces of a proto-realist tendency, through its playful interventions into the staging of narrative creation. The contribution of my project to scholarship is twofold. First, it offers comparative readings of texts that have not yet been drawn together, hoping to re-adjust the common ascriptions of ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Realism’ to Hoffmann and Balzac respectively, and to identify a new complication in the relationship of those generic categories. Second, it articulates a new account of mimesis. By drawing on the work of twentieth-century theorists such as Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin and Merleau-Ponty, it shows that ‘mimesis’ refers not merely to the imitation of an object, but rather to the reproduction of a particular sensory experience of that object. This perspective on mimesis allows me to unfold new readings of the two authors. How is life compromised in the name of fiction, of the artwork? This question recurs compulsively in Hoffmann’s tales, figured in repeated and near-repeated scenarios in which the everyday is pitted against an ideal or delusional alternative. When Balzac imitates or repeats this mimetic question in the works I consider, it is invariably figured in the image of Hoffmann, called upon as a fictional co-author or authorial double, or as a para-textual element, often in highly visual terms. The thesis thus addresses what I have come to term the ‘stakes of mimesis’. If a particular compromise, or particular stakes, are involved in the creation of fictions, for Balzac those stakes are drawn in distinctly Hoffmannesque terms. The thesis is structured according to the conviction that the relationship between the two writers is not simply a linear one of filiation or influence, but one led by a more complicated sense of imitation. To this end, I take to task the conventional figure of the narrative ‘line’ and follow it through various Romantic and modernist complications. My first chapter, ‘Chiasm’, works as a conceptual introduction to the readings, tracing a particular account of literary mimesis from Plato to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The four subsequent chapters each read a pair of texts by Hoffmann and Balzac alongside one another. Chapter Two, ‘Line’, focuses on the arabesque lines of Der goldne Topf and La Peau de chagrin. Chapter Three, under the emblem ‘Trope’, examines the paper identities of characters in Die Abenteuer der Sylvester-Nacht and Le Colonel Chabert. Chapter Four, ‘Figure’, considers the delusional artist figures and ekphrastic narrative frameworks of Der Artushof and Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. Finally, Chapter Five, ‘Cross’, examines questions of inheritance between Die Elixiere des Teufels and L’Élixir de longue vie. In unfolding these emblematic figures as models of reading, I seek new ways of thinking about the relationship between these two authors, and about the act of comparative reading.

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This dissertation is a critique of Marx's theory of alienation with emphasis on how Marx constructed his definition of man and consciousness. The main premise of the theory is that private property caused alienation but the hypothesis of this dissertation is that because the theory defined man and consciousness in an erroneous manner alienation was not possible, and that the conditions observed by Marx were exacerbated by landlessness. / Political Sciences / M.A. (Politics)

This dissertation is a critique of Marx's theory of alienation with emphasis on how Marx constructed his definition of man and consciousness. The main premise of the theory is that private property caused alienation but the hypothesis of this dissertation is that because the theory defined man and consciousness in an erroneous manner alienation was not possible, and that the conditions observed by Marx were exacerbated by landlessness. / Political Sciences / M.A. (Politics)