French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

Models Of Emulation: Representations Of Foreign, Indigenous, And Accented Speech In Early American Literature, Elaina A. Frulla

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

“Models of Emulation: Representations of Foreign, Indigenous, and Accented Speech in Early American Literature” explores how American writers used depictions of “nonstandard” English and accented English language speech, traditionally described as “literary dialect,” as a way to negotiate identity, power, and political belonging in the formative years of nation building after the American Revolution. Beginning with Noah Webster’s mission to establish a standardized pronunciation of the English language that would simplify and purify spoken American-English and definitively differentiate it from what he saw as the corrupted, cosmopolitan British-English model, each of the three chapters examines literary representations of nonstandard emulated …

Playing Proverbs With Madame De Genlis, Rebecca Cypess

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The theatrical genre known as the proverbe dramatique, which flourished as a pastime of French high society during the late eighteenth century, has often been understood through the written exemplars left by the author and artist Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle. Yet Carmontelle’s literary contributions to the genre have obscured the vast range of activities known as jouer des proverbes (playing proverbs)—activities associated especially with women—which included conversational games, pantomime, poetry, dance, and music making. Attending to the many descriptions of jouer des proverbes left by Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin, the Com­tesse de Genlis, reveals that the literary …

Toxic Varnishes: Perfumes, Stench, And Glow In Eighteenth-Century French Salons, Érika Wicky

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

As several historians, including Alain Corbin, have noted, a new sensitivity to odors emerged in the 18^th century that increased people’s negative responses to strong smells and heightened the demand for fragrances that were not only pleasant but also light and subtle. Some scholars see this period as a true “olfactory revolution.” How was this expressed in the salon, perceived both as a luxurious space and a site of elite sociability? This focus on the smell of varnish aims to illustrate how the scent of materials intertwined with the pleasures of decorative arts, both in the entire space of …

French Interwar Popular Romance And Ideals Of Femininity: A Literary And Historical Study Of Magali, Kelly Kamrath

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Against a background of political turmoil, economic crises, and cultural upsets from both within and abroad, France between the two World Wars was home to a flourishing romance novel industry. At first glance lighthearted love stories seem simple and frivolous in comparison to the canonical writings of the time, such as those of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. However, this literature was far from art for art’s sake. The romance novels of interwar France, written half a century before the scholarship of romance fiction would truly begin, have yet to receive the attention they deserve. During the interwar period, …

Le Dix-Neuvième Siècle : Les Mouvements Littéraires Français Et La Classe Ouvrière, Grace Horton

World Languages and Cultures Senior Capstones

This presentation is an analysis of the connections between the different literary movements of 19th century France, such as romanticism, realism, and modernism, and how they were initiated by the French revolutions of 1830 and 1848. It covers the impacts of these revolutions on different prolific 19th century French writers such as Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Charles Baudelaire, and how each writer prompted their respective movements.

L’Évolution Du Libéralisme Dans La Littérature Au Xixe Siècle, Sophie Hardy

World Languages and Cultures Senior Capstones

This presentation is a dissection of a quote made by Victor Hugo during the preface of his work Hernani (1830), where he wrote that, “romanticism is just liberalism in literature". This presentation strives to contradict this statement by analyzing Hugo’s early works before the revolution of 1830 to prove that not all of his works discussed liberalism. This presentation will also analyze the works of Alphonse de Lamartine and Alfred de Musset during this romantic era and compares Hugo’s earlier statement to their works.

Doris Provencher-Faucher Research Library Bibliography, Usm Franco-American Collection

Collection Aids

Doris Provencher-Faucher Research Library Bibliography

Heroes, Victims, And Future Citizens: Representations Of French Children During World War I, Megan R. Outtrim

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The effects of total war society in France during WWI dramatically altered the daily lives of both adults and children, witnessing increasing levels of patriotic rhetoric, wartime propaganda, and anti-German sentiment. Children were often made the focal point of this propaganda, as they represented the future of the nation. As such, three specific representations of children emerge from WWI propaganda in France: the heroic child, the victimized child, and the malleable future citizen. Some of these representations were depicted in propaganda meant for children specifically, while others were depicted in propaganda meant to mobilize adults in the name of children. …

Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Enslavement, colonization, and the systems that uphold racial injustice were and still are a series of new, unfathomable, and challenging experiences that prompt individuals within the diaspora to seek orientation. How does a human cope with centuries of attempts at the systematic destruction of their humanity, culture, and identity? How can they reclaim that identity, especially when so much of it seems lost? I address these questions by utilizing texts from the expansive body of work regarding ethnographic-historical-religious studies on Afro-spiritual practices to better analyze instances in literature in the ongoing practice of diasporic orientation. In this project, I argue …

Beauvoir, “French” Feminisms, And “Translation Work:” A Roundtable Conversation, Sandrine Sanos, Judith G. Coffin

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This conversation featuring four scholars—Sandrine Sanos, Judith G. Coffin, Lorraine Delavaud, Marine Vaslin—took place on zoom on December 1, 2023. It was organized, transcribed, and edited by Sandrine Sanos who also wrote the introduction to contextualize the conversation. The roundtable reflects on the making of the translation of Judith Coffin’s book on Beauvoir; and how it became a collective object, and the challenges and productive limitations that it involved, showing how such a project helped forge and relied upon transnational, transdisciplinary, and transgenerational feminist solidarities. The ways Beauvoir became a transatlantic object sheds light on the ways that the book …

Marriage Stories: Legal Reform And The Novel In France And Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Marriage Stories” analyzes connections between novelistic form, marriage law reform, and portrayals of virtue in texts by, among others, Stéphanie de Genlis, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie Cottin, Claire de Duras, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Sophie Doin, George Sand, Anne Brontë, and Gustave Flaubert. I argue that the novel was less concerned with abolishing or even critiquing marriage than it was with delineating “good” from “bad” unions, which in turn reflects contemporary discussions about marriage’s role in response to burgeoning social movements. My first chapter considers the epistolary novel in relation to the idea of spouses existing as “one body” culturally …

"Oiez Mon Aventure": Cuer D'Acier's Nonbinary Gender In Perceforest, Brooke Heidenreich Findley

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The character of Cuer d’Acier, or Heart of Steel, in the 15^th century French romance Perceforest, has a complex gender identity that does not fit easily into a gender binary. First appearing as the courtly maiden Neronés, the character later lives and is read as a man. The romance uses both “he” and “she” pronouns to refer to Heart of Steel, often using both in the space of a single paragraph or even a single sentence. While Heart of Steel is again dressed as a woman at the end of the romance, the character’s own actions and statements …

War On Humor: Killing Laughter In Times Of Strife, Maria Christina Kardash

CAFE Symposium 2023

This project explores the use of humor as a coping mechanism throughout the first World War. It focuses on three main aspects: (1) the evolution of humor prior to, contemporary to, and after WWI; (2) the contrast between Germany's strict oppression of humor and France's more free approach; (3) and the distinction between civilian and soldier humor.

Political Economy In Lettres D'Une Péruvienne: Françoise De Graffigny As Philosophe And Reformer, Marguerite J. Van Cook

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation identifies the significant presence of political economics in Lettres d’une Péruvienne by Françoise de Graffigny, née Françoise d'Issembourg du Buisson d'Happencourt (1695 –1758), to affirm its author as a pioneer in the field. It explores Graffigny’s use of the sentimental novel as a vehicle to carry those ideas to the reading community. It reviews Graffigny’s preparation to propose novel ideas in the area of political economics and to fully participate in the then-emergent discourse with her male contemporaries. Her wide reading in the subject of Political Economy, from Voltaire to Mandeville and Montesquieu and her interactions with contemporaries …

Humoring The Third Republic: Le Rire In French Politics And Popular Culture, 1894–1918, Andrew C. Kotick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the illustrated satirical periodical Le Rire in its historical context between its debut during the Dreyfus Affair and the conclusion of World War I. Adopting a multivalent approach to the historical study of graphic humor, it argues that Le Rire constitutes a significant corpus of evidence for understanding the political, commercial, social, and cultural novelties of its time, and maintained an ambivalent relationship with the young institutions and functionaries of the French Third Republic. As France’s leading satirical periodical, Le Rire served as a powerful medium for broadcasting nascent and extreme ideas to a mass reading public …

Gendered Violence And The Family: An Analysis Of The 14th-Century Epic "Lion De Bourges", Ashley Paige Holt

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is the first to focus on gender roles within the fourteenth-century French epic Lion de Bourges and the first work to feature extensive translations into English of this medieval text. Using the cyclical dismemberment and reunification of the Bourges family as a lens, it brings into focus the various members of the family, their relationships, and the larger thematic questions about family and society put forward by the poet. Chapter one interrogates the notion of the king as a national father figure as well as the spread of injury and violence from the father/king to the members of …

Scenes Of Screens, Scenes Of Sodomy: The Role And Impact Of The Folding Screen In Eighteenth-Century French Erotic Novels, Katherine Delony

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

This project provides an analysis of the folding screen as a literary agent and signifier which reflects the cultural happenings of the eighteenth century with specific emphasis on new ideas about queerness which arise in France during the eighteenth century. I will focus primarily on the Marquis de Sade’s (1740-1814) Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la vertu (1791) (as well as La Nouvelle Justine, 1797) and John Cleland’s (1709-1789) Le Fille de Joie (translated 1751) with reference to Jean-Louis Fougeret de Monbron’s (1706-1760) Margot la Ravaudeuse (1753), Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir Jean-François de Bastide’s (1724-1798) La …

Armored Feelings: Romantic Love, Sexual Consent, And Gender-Based Violence In French First World War Narratives (1914–1956), Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Armored Feelings examines how the First World War reconfigured how the French thought and wrote about romantic love, sexual consent, and gender-based violence. It posits this devastating event as a critical juncture during which the misogynistic and racist notion of amour à la Française took its modern shape as a rhetoric buttressing the nation’s brittle sense of cultural superiority while obscuring diverse forms of gendered aggression – especially those perpetrated by its citizens against women. This dissertation also establishes that the notion of women’s sexual consent coalesced during the period under examination as a troubled and troubling response to the …

Maurice Scève Avant La Délie (1535–1544). Une Étude Des Genres Mineurs À L’Origine D’Une Nouvelle Esthétique Poétique, Elizaveta Lyulekina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cette thèse propose d’étudier l’influence du poète lyonnais Maurice Scève, actif entre 1535 et 1562, sur la formation de genres littéraires et le développement de la poésie française de la Renaissance. Elle explore également la contribution considérable du poète à la création de l’identité linguistique et culturelle française.

This dissertation studies the influence of the Lyonnais poet Maurice Scève, active between 1535 and 1562, on the formation of literary genres and the development of French Renaissance poetry. It also explores the poet’s considerable contribution to the creation of French linguistic and cultural identity.

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

Le Secret D’Une Pyramide : Diderot, La Double Doctrine Et L’Encyclopédie, Rudy Le Menthéour

French and Francophone Studies Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …

Opposing Strands: The Mediterranean As Site Of Cultural Conflict Around 1900, Neil F. Mcwilliam

Artl@s Bulletin

From antiquity to the Third Republic, this article follows visual and literary representations that measured space, time and ideological oppositions that spawned an image of the Mediterranean as an area of transmission and cultural tension. It focuses on three theorists: the head of Action Française, Charles Maurras; the novelist Louis Bertrand; and critic and cultural impresario Joachim Gasquet. Each contributed to the formation of an image of the Mediterranean basin as the birthplace of European heritage and a battlefield in a struggle against the forces of democracy and cultural hybridization.

Learning To Eat French, John Westbrook

Faculty Journal Articles

Ferguson’s Accounting for Taste reveals a gap in our understanding: How did French culinary discourse move beyond the bourgeois sphere in which it emerged in the nineteenth century? Picking up on her comparison of the Proustian synthesis of regional and national culinary culture in the Recherche to the project of national identity creation in the Third Republic’s best-selling textbook, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, this essay argues that the culinary model Ferguson describes was in fact widely disseminated through mass primary education under the Third Republic. Examining an overlooked corpus of primary school readers and textbooks, I …

Stitching The Fragmented: 360° Videos For Language And Culture Learning, Melanie Peron, Victoria Karasic

Frameless

Emerging technologies present new opportunities for students to bridge the distance of space and time, allowing them to relate to a difficult period in history: the Shoah. Over the last few years, students in a French history and culture course have participated in a series of digital projects ranging in nature from mapping to 3D modeling, with the latest being student-created 360° videos in order to fill in the blanks left by time in memory. These digital humanities projects allow students to walk the footsteps of survivors, vanished victims, and period writers in modern-day Paris by visiting physical places studied …

Intolerable Histories And Imperfect Narratives: Nationhood, Identity, And The Integrity Of Law In Post-Vichy France And Beyond, Kaela S. Holmen

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The principal aim of this thesis project is to examine the socio-legal context of the Vichy regime in World War II France, and to provide an understanding of how that context informed, and continues to inform, the integrity of French nationhood. With Ernest Renan’s oubli serving as a framework for the solidification of nationhood, I will demonstrate that the betrayals to French law and custom that were committed in an attempt to right the wrongs of the Vichy resulted in an imperfect forgetting, and ultimately, a more fragmented national sense of self. I contend that this imperfect oubli resulting from …

The Surreal Voice In Milan's Itinerant Poetics: Delio Tessa To Franco Loi, Jason Collins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the course of Italy’s linguistic history, dialect literature has evolved a s a genre unto itself. The scope of research presented in this study examines the question of dialect literature as a valid genre which bears lines of demarcation that would assign it the distinction of genre. Research reveals that in fact the simple election of a language, or dialect, does not itself constitute a genre; moreover, most dialect literature bears characteristics that would neatly place it in another genre.

To examine this verity, this research compares two dialect poets who employ Milanese as a means of transmission …

A Tale Of Two Nations’ Histories The Application Of Literary Fairy Tales As A Firsthand Account Of History, Nicholas Gottlob

Honors College Theses

Fairy tales are often thought to be solely for children as a means of education and entertainment. The literary fairy tale provided a medium that allowed authors to express their opinions under the guise of a story. This has not always been the case as literary fairy tales have been utilized as political instruments by authors and intended for a highly educated audience. Using fairy tales as a facade provided protection for authors, as outright criticisms against those in power usually resulted in dire consequences such as imprisonment or even death for the objector. The literary fairy tale provided a …

Cambodian Family Albums: Tian's "L'Année Du Lièvre", Angelica P. So

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article explores how Franco-Cambodian cartoonist Tian’s graphic novel, L’année du lièvre [Year of the Rabbit], represents second-generation postmemory in the form of, what I call, a “Cambodian family album,” or a personal-collective archive. The album serves to convey to subsequent generations: 1) the history of the Cambodian genocide, 2) the collective memories of pre-1975 Cambodia preceding the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh, and 3) the Cambodian humanitarian crisis and exodus of the 1970s-1990s. The conceptualization of the family album is derived from the literal translation, from Khmer into English, of the term “photo album” – “book designated for …

Bernard Palissy: Early Career - Securing Patronage And Mimicking Nature In A Moment Of Crisis, Karissa Bailey

LSU Master's Theses

Early in 1562, France was experiencing a state of high religious tension between Protestants and Catholics that would precipitate the outbreak of the Religious Wars on March 1. A week before, Bernard Palissy, a Huguenot potter, wrote a letter to his Catholic patron from prison inBordeaux where he was being held on charges associated with an iconoclastic incident in his home city of Saintes. This letter would later be published as a dedication letter for the pamphlet Architecture et Ordonnance, which featured the description of a grotto commissioned by Anne de Montmorency, Palissy’s patron, seven years earlier. This thesis analyzes …