School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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    Scripting love and gender in fairy tales by French women writers, 1690–1709
    Reddan, Bronwyn Kate ( 2016)
    Between 1690 and 1709, more than one hundred fairy tales were written by French authors. Women writers created two-thirds of this corpus, and their tales developed emotion scripts that challenged the patriarchal politics of courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century France. This thesis focuses on the scripts for love in tales by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier, Catherine Bernard, Henriette-Julie de Murat, Charlotte-Rose de La Force, Catherine Durand, and Louise d’Auneuil. Love is the central theme in the conteuses’ tales, but they do not develop a single perspective on love, nor do they offer a definitive answer to the question of whether love has a positive effect on the lives of women. Their complex, literary tales question the idealisation of love as the ultimate fairy tale happy ending by presenting it as a destructive, irrational force as well as a source of fulfilment and joy. Each author develops different scripts for the performance of love in courtship and marriage, and these scripts articulate a series of different perspectives on the gender politics of love in seventeenth-century France. This variation in the representation of love reflects the social realities faced by the conteuses and their contemporary female audiences, as well as seventeenth-century debate about the nature of love. The methodology in this thesis draws on history of emotion scholarship in order to analyse how the emotion scripts in the conteuses’ tales were used to negotiate and challenge gender relationships in France at the turn of the eighteenth century. I argue that these scripts provide evidence of the formation of a literary emotional community engaged in a conversation about the effects of love on the lives of seventeenth-century women. This conversation developed a shared vocabulary of emotion to articulate a poetics of love that reinterpreted conventional scripts for love in seventeenth-century literary and philosophical texts. Each author used this vocabulary to present her own interpretation of the consequences of love, and proposed different strategies for negotiating power imbalances in early modern gender relationships between men and women. While some of their heroines use love to justify their choice of spouse, others are disappointed in their choice, or fail to achieve the union they desire. These different perspectives illustrate the nature of love as a complex emotion with a history that reflects the political and social context in which it is felt and expressed.
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    Mobilisation and memory: the uses of the past in France, August 1914
    Churchill, Amie Lee ( 2015)
    This thesis investigates the use of memory in the French free press in August 1914 as the French mobilised for war, and in select imagery thereafter. It seeks to understand the cultural ramifications for collective remembrance and amnesia and its social divisions, with a particular focus on the French Revolution and its political legacy.