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The aim of this article is to analyse and compare representations of the Crimean war in three neo-Victorian novels, Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie (1998), Julia Gregson's The Water Horse (2004) and Katharine McMahon's The Rose of Sebastopol (2007), with reference to the commonly established view of this historical event. The novels foreground the experience of civilians who found themselves on the periphery of the battlefields, caring for the casualties of the war. As the course of history and private lives intersect, the main characters undergo a personal transformation; for the female protagonists, the experience leads to liberation from conventional gender roles. It is argued that by focusing on civilians rather than soldiers the novels offer a new perspective on the war; nonetheless, they uphold its overwhelmingly negative image in British collective memory.

This dissertation offers readings of novels by Pierre Guyotat, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano and other lesser-known French authors of the twentieth and twenty-first century, analyzing the representation of the “appelés d’Algérie,” the last citizens of France to be mobilized in a wartime draft. Dating back to the Third Republic, military service played a key role in turning both metropolitan and colonial populations into Frenchmen, though clearly not under the same conditions or in the same way. A historically informed account of military service’s role in citizenship formation can provide a useful analytic frame for clarifying literary engagements with contemporary French “identity-talk,” i.e. political and discursive deployments of identity and identity politics, as well as debates around laïcité, universalist assimilationism, and “communautarisme.” In early literary responses to the Algerian War, the character of the conscript serves to criticize the rising tide of consumerism and Americanization in postwar France. In novels by Daniel Anselme and René-Nicolas Ehni, draftees participate in a homosocial republicanism in which “fraternité” trumps both atomized individualism and the normative heterosexual couple, a locus of consumption. In novels by Perec and Modiano, resistance to conscription enables a critique of universalist citizenship, as the figure of the insubordinate or ambivalent conscript provides an opportunity to reckon with Jewish identity and French anti-Semitism. My analysis addresses the unequal and uneven distribution of political rights based on “identity” factors as well as the asymmetrical deployment of the term “communautarisme.” Certain of Guyotat’s texts are perceived to respond politically and aesthetically to the Algerian War, even though they refuse the conventions of realism, verisimilitude, and even representation. Using Foucault to read Guyotat, my analysis of his work provides an opportunity to address twentieth-century French debates concerning engaged and autonomous art, as well as the relationship of radical politics to radical form. I turn in my last chapter to recent novels by the prize-wining French novelists Alexis Jenni, Laurent Mauvignier, Jérôme Ferrari, and Alice Ferney. Set in part during the Algerian War, these novels draw explicit parallels between colonial violence and race-based violence in France today. These rhetorical parallels can obscure historical contingency and complexity, such as the evolving construction of the concept of “race.” Likewise, these novels contrast a virile, homogenous military and an effeminate, fractured republic and can be read as parables for the rise of the Front National in contemporary France. My analysis shows how these works can both participate in and critique particular racialized and gendered views of the French republic.

Breaking the Frames of the Past examines recent visual and literary work about the periods of historical violence in Argentina, Chile, and Peru. In my dissertation, I argue that these cultural productions can challenge the linear conception of historical time, and reveal the existent tensions and blind spots present within the cultural memory realm of each nation. By examining the specificity of the materials and the aesthetic strategies present in the works, I hope to elucidate a necessary introspective turn in memory- what I have nominated metamemory, present in works that not only seek to interrogate official national paradigms, discourses of the past, productions of knowledge, and memorial imperatives, but also works that are profoundly aware of their condition as memory objects within a cultural memory realms. Breaking the Frames of the Past is divided into two parts, Part One: Images, engages with memory at a broader collective level, and analyzes the different ways the photographic medium has been used to represent the past and craft a sense of national belonging. Part Two: Texts is concerned with subjective memory, and the overlap between childhood memories lived simultaneously within the frame of a period of historical violence. I discuss literary work written by those born during these periods of violence in order to see how from their subjective experience and through their works they can assert to the existing tensions within cultural memory paradigms. In examining novels by those who are “the Secondary Characters” of history, I argue that their use of metafictional strategies is able to counter the feeling of displacement and sense of belatedness that is present in postmemory works.

Unlike the Russian Civil War or Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989) never acquired a stable, dominant narrative in Soviet or Russian culture. Even as the war was in progress, Soviet media revised its evaluation of key events and players to reflect the changing political tides through the 1980s. After the war ended, state leaders were distracted by the political turbulence of the 1990s, and the citizens—largely unaffected by the war on a personal level—were not particularly interested in assessing either the war’s successes or failures. This lack of definition left the descriptions and representations of the Soviet-Afghan War open to the influence of evolving political realities and agendas. This study examines the literary techniques and strategies that writers Svetlana Alexievich and Alexander Prokhanov have employed in articulating different narratives that responded to the shifting demands of the moment. With respect to the several revisions that Alexievich made to her documentary novel Zinky Boys from its initial publication in 1990 through its final version in 2007, I argue that the author’s position as anti-authoritarian and anti-war becomes increasingly rigid. Like many liberal-minded members of the intelligentsia after the fall of the Soviet Union, Alexievich had early hopes for a transition from totalitarianism to democracy in her native Belarus which would be disappointed. The poetics of her documentary prose, I argue, challenge the traditional identities and relationships of author, character, and reader by destabilizing the boundaries and allowing crossovers between roles. By engaging the reader in constructing the deeper meaning of the novel, Alexievich projects her reader into the full and active participation of a citizen building a new post-Soviet state. Prokhanov, situated on the opposite side of the political divide, also made substantial revisions to his novels about the Soviet-Afghan War. Prokhanov’s 1994 novel The Palace is remarkable for its change in message and tone from the narratives of his Soviet-era writing on Afghanistan: it openly questions the Soviet Politburo’s decision to invade, and includes surreal dreamlike sequences that, I argue, reflect his contemporaneous collaboration with Alexander Dugin, founding proponent of neo-Eurasianism. In Dream about Kabul—his 2001 “remake” of his own 1982 novel Tree in the Center of Kabul—Prokhanov’s alter-ego protagonist becomes an even more passive participant in the progression of the Soviet-Afghan War, compared to The Palace, as well as a powerless pawn in the political conspiracies involving the Russian Federation, Israel, and the United States. His reader is more like the obedient subject of a tsar than the politically engaged citizen of a democracy, as envisioned by Alexievich. In my study of the substantial revisions that Alexievich and Prokhanov made to their Soviet-Afghan War stories from the 1980s into the twenty-first century, I demonstrate how the literary representations of a military conflict in recent Soviet history reflect the increasing polarization of political and social realities facing authors and readers in the post-Soviet states of Russia and Belarus. The aesthetic decisions that Alexievich and Prokhanov made in revising their Soviet-Afghan War stories carry political and ethical implications. Thus, the relationship between implied author and implied reader in a literary text becomes a political statement about the relationship between the state and the citizen.

This full-length survey of late Marinetti aims to contribute to the study of the Italian twentieth-century avant-garde by recovering unpublished literary texts and bringing them to the attention of international critics and the general public. The result is an "F. T. Marinetti Redux," which I aimed to bring out of the "American manuscripts" preserved at the Beinecke Library at Yale University in order to trigger a critical revival of the last, and least studied, creative phase of Marinetti's career. The novelty of my approach lies in the combination of psychoanalytical methods and rhetorical analysis. In my study, I argue that personification is the master trope of Marinetti's writing. I define the Marinettian poetics of personification in terms of an ideological clash between organic and inorganic, in which the writer's recurrent inclination to humanize inert matter prevails over his better-known aspiration to mechanize the "new futurist man." I then use the Freudian notion of fetish, as understood through Giorgio Agamben's Stanze, to re-conceptualize the relationship between the Italian avant-garde and the tradition of the past. From a broader perspective, my most innovative contribution deals with the relation between the living body and the inorganic world, the system of objects and its representation in the arts. Chapter one analyzes the stylistic and rhetorical use of personification, prosopopeia and anthropomorphism, emphasizing the epistemological implications of this recurrent trope against the critical commonplace that sees Marinetti as the perfect emblem of a dangerous tendency toward reification and alienation in modern life. Chapter two examines how Marinetti elaborates the discourse of war in his late autobiographical writings. This analysis starts with a close reading of Originalit�� russa di masse distanze e radiocuori, posthumously rediscovered in the Beinecke archive. In this autofictional work, completed after his return from the Russian front, Marinetti indulges in a partially autobiographical war report, a genre he had explored in earlier works like L'alc��va d'acciaio and 8 Anime in una bomba, both centered around events that took place during World War I. Drawing on an analysis of the unpublished novel Venezianella e Studentaccio, in chapter three I consider the metaphor of destruction and reconstruction of a city as an essential "architectural" image in Marinetti's iconoclastic poetics of regeneration. The loved and hated Venice is the main polemical target of this Marinettian metafictional master metaphor, from the early manifesto Contro Venezia passatista to the late Venezianella. Investigating how this utopian and equally fetishistic architectural mythopoeia relies on the futurist metropolitan ideology, I also explore the development of a Venetian imaginary in Marinetti's body of works. In the appendix I have included the critical edition of Marinetti's unpublished poem, Il Poema di Fiume.

This thesis examines the literary journal Horizon, its editor Cyril Connolly, and a selection of its editorial articles, poems, short stories and essays in the context of the Second World War, from 1939-45. Analyses of these works, their representation of wartime experience, and their artistic merit, serve as evidence of a shared and sustained literary engagement with the war. Collectively, they demonstrate Horizon’s role as one of the primary outlets for British literature and cultural discourse during the conflict. Previous assessments of the magazine as an apolitical organ with purely aesthetic concerns have led to enduring critical neglect and misappraisal. This thesis shows that, contrary to the commonly held view, Horizon consistently offered space for political debate, innovative criticism, and war-relevant content. It argues that Horizon’s wartime writing is indicative of the many varied types of literary response to a war that was all but incomprehensible for those who experienced it. These poems, stories and essays offer a distinctive and illuminating insight into the war and are proof that a viable literary culture thrived during the war years. This thesis also argues that Horizon, as a periodical, should be considered as a creative entity in and of itself, and is worthy of being studied in this light. The magazine’s constituent parts, interesting enough when considered separately, are shaped, informed, and granted new shades of meaning by their position alongside other works in Horizon. Chapters in the thesis cover editorials and editing, poetry, short stories, political essays, and critical essays respectively. Analyses of individual works are situated in the context of larger concerns in order to demonstrate the coherence of debate and discourse that characterised Horizon’s wartime run. In arguing that Horizon is a singular creative entity worthy of consideration in its own right, this thesis locates itself within the emerging field of periodical studies. Further, by arguing that the magazine demonstrates the value of Second World War literature, it articulates with other recent attempts to reassess the scope and quality of that literature. More specifically, this thesis offers the first focused and in-depth analysis of Horizon’s formative years.

[spa] Esta tesis analiza la relación entre ficción y efectos de verdad en la obra del novelista contemporáneo Tim O'Brien y examina la reflexión implícita en dicha obra en torno al concepto de verdad. Pondera, además, el efecto distorsionador que la noción objetivista de "verdad" ha tenido sobre la recepción de dicha obra. Por último, y partiendo del "giro lingüístico" que ha tenido lugar en la filosofía analítica del siglo XX, propone una interpretación alternativa a la luz de la semántica de los mundos posibles.