This study sets out to uncover the thus far unexplored affinities between the works of Carlo Emilio Gadda and Michel Leiris, two key figures of twentieth-century literature whose place within the broader European literary panorama has been largely overlooked. Through an inquiry into three interconnected areas – the question of 'community'; the relationship between male self and female other; and writing as a space in which a fractured experience of subjectivity is both played out and exposed – I argue that their works are underpinned by a parallel tension, between a nostalgia for a lost experience of unity and a recognition of its impossibility within a fractured modernity. Chapter One examines the relationship between the individual and the communal. With a focus on Gadda's Giornale di guerra e di prigionia, and Leiris's involvement in a series of key intellectual, literary and political societies of the 1930s and 1940s, it argues that while both authors were drawn to a form of communal integration, both were ultimately thwarted in their attempts to reinstate it. Chapter Two continues this inquiry into the relationship between self and other through an examination of the dysfunctional relationship between individual (male) self and (female) other. With a focus on Leiris's L'Age d'homme and Gadda's Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, it questions the extent to which any authentic relationship between male self and female other is ruled out, and examines the association between sexuality and fear that underpins their approach to the sphere of the female at large. The final chapter examines the implications of the authors' shared loss of faith in the notion of a unified, authentic experience of selfhood for their approach to the literary act itself. Through a study of these three key areas, this study thus sets out to respond to the need for further contextualisation of these two key figures of the twentieth-century European literary panorama, in the conviction that a comparative examination will shed new light both on their individual works and on their shared affinity with a number of key tenets of twentieth-century European thought.

Continuant notre réflexion sur la transmédialité et la transculturalité, nous voulons donner quelques exemples issus de la littérature qui soient capables d’illustrer pars pro toto ce que nous avons élaboré dans la première partie, dans L’Éducation sentimentale de Flaubert par exemple, dans les nouvelles de Borges : "L’Aleph" et "Le jardin aux sentiers qui bifurquent", dans l’oeuvre de Frida Kahlo, mais aussi dans d’autres oeuvres qui ne seront pas traitées ici, telles que les romans de Robbe-Grillet Le Voyeur, La jalousie, La Maison des Rendez-vous, Pour une révolution à New York ou d’Italo Calvino, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore ; dans les travaux des années 90 de Robert Wilson que j’ai appelés "spectacularité", tels que Cosmopolitan greetings, Parzival auf der anderen Seite des Sees ou Black Rider. Mais aussi dans Carlos W. Saénz (1956- ) (2003) d’Alejandro Tantanián ou les "présentations- pseudo-prothèse" de Periférico de Objetos comme Variaciones sobre B... (1991), El hombre de arena (1992), Cámara Gesell (1993), Máquina Hamlet (1995), Zooedipo (1998) ou Monteverdi método bélico (2000).:L’Éducation sentimentale de Flaubert ou l’anticipation du film. - "L''aleph et "Le jardin aux sentiers qui bifurquent" de Borges : de la représentation a la "présence" ou la création des médias ; de l''"hypermonde" et des "mondes multiples". - Stratégies transmédiales hybrides et transculturelles dans l’oeuvre de Frida Kahlo. - Architecture, art, installations lumineuses et performatives, internet, virtualité. - Alejandro Tantanián : "installation-performance", virtualité et hyperréalisme : Carlos W. Saenz. - Conclusion

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The subject of this thesis is the by now traditional grouping of certain innovative works of historiography produced in eighteenth-century Britain and France; namely the historical works of Voltaire, and the historical writings of the philosophes; and, in Britain, the histories of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. This thesis gives a historical and expository analysis of the individual strategies of literary self-fashioning and generic appropriation which underlie this impression of resemblance. It particularly demonstrates that the major characteristics of the contemporary vision of philosophic historiography – the idea of a European history of manners or l’esprit humain, and the insistence on the rejection of the practices of the érudits – which have become incorporated within scholarly definitions of ‘Enlightenment historiography’, are well-established generic tropes, adapted and affected in France as in Britain, by authors of diverse ambitions. The invitation to assume inauthentic connections contained within the practice of philosophic historiography is shown to be embraced by Gibbon, in a notable literary challenge to the paradigms of intellectual history. This study contrasts the textual evidence of these authors’ experience of literary, personal, and political challenges regarding the definition of their role as public, intellectual writers, to the acquired image of an ideal of ‘Enlightenment writing’. It considers the Frenchness of philosophie, and the potential Britishness of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. As part of its wider analysis of the practice of intellectual writing with a historical focus, its scope includes the writings of British clerics and writers on religion; of French academicians; and of the late philosophe Volney, and Shelley his interpreter. The major conclusion of this thesis is that eighteenth-century British and French history writing does not support any synthesis of an Enlightenment historical philosophy, narrative, or method; while it is suggested that one of the costs of the construct of ‘Enlightenment’, has been the illusion of familiarity with eighteenth-century intellectual culture, in France as well as Britain.

After World War II in Italy the cultural scene was in need of resuscitation. Artists searched for tools with which to revifify their works. Central to this, for many key figures in the fifties and sixties, was an engagement with English-language Modernism. This phenomenon has been widely recognised, but this thesis is its first sustained analysis. I draw together the receptions of three English-language Modernist authors – T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce – who, as a triad, were instrumental in the radicalisation of the arts in Italy in the fifties and sixties. I show that their works were elevated as models of an experimental approach to language that was revisited by Italian artists – most notably by poets associated with the Neoavantgarde. The specific Modernist linguistic techniques which were adopted by the Italians that we will consider here are the mingling of languages and styles, the use of citations, and the perversion and manipulation of single words and idioms. The poets considered in most depth to exemplify this phenomenon are Edoardo Sanguineti, who was a major exponent of the Neoavantgarde, and Amelia Rosselli, who was more peripherally and problematically associated with the movement. Both poets desecrated the traditional language of poetry and energised their own poetry with recourse to Modernist techniques which they consciously and deliberately adopted from Eliot, Pound and Joyce. An unpicking of the mechanics of these techniques in Sanguineti's and Rosselli's poetry reveals that their texts necessitate an active mode of reading. This aligns with the intellectual ideas propounded by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, all of whom grounded their theories on readership in analyses of the linguistic experiments of Modernism. Sanguineti's and Rosselli's poetry fulfil the characteristics of Eco's “open” work, Barthes' “polysemous” work, and bring about Benjamin's “shock-effect” in the reader. These radical linguistic techniques, appropriated from the Modernists, contribute to each poets' overall poetic projects – they enact Edoardo Sanguineti's anarchic and revolutionary impulses, and stage Amelia Rosselli's thematic conflicts.

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’.

The motif of 'exile-and-return' is found in works from a wide range of periods and linguistic traditions. The standard narrative pattern depicts the return of wrongfully exiled heroes or peoples to their former abode or their establishment of a superior home, which signals a restoration of order. The appeal of the pattern lies in its association with undue loss, rightful recovery and the universal vindication of the protagonist. Though by no means confined to any one period or region, the particular narrative pattern of the exile-and-return motif is prevalent in vernacular texts of England and Spain around 1170–1250. This is the subject of the thesis. The following research engages with scholarship on Anglo-Norman romances and their characteristic use of exile-and-return that sets them apart from continental French romances, by highlighting the widespread employment of this narrative pattern in Spanish poetic works during the same period. The prevalence of the pattern in both literatures is linked to analogous interaction with continental French works, the relationship between the texts and their political contexts, and a common responses to wider ecclesiastical reforms. A broader aim is to draw attention to further, unacknowledged similarities between contemporary texts from these different linguistic traditions, as failure to take into account the wider, multilingual literary contexts of this period leads to incomplete arguments. The methodology is grounded in close reading of four main texts selected for their exemplarity, with some consideration of the historical context and contemporary intertexts: the Romance of Horn, the Cantar de mio Cid, Gui de Warewic and the Poema de Fernán González. A range of intertexts are considered alongside in order to elucidate the particular concerns and distinctive use of exile-and-return in the main works.

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.