In the chapter entitled “Des différentes manières de se servir de l’éventail”, included in hisLivre des quatre couleurs, Caraccioli explains the Oriental origins of the fan. Such interest in the fan on the part of one of the leading analysts of French customs reflects the increasing fascination amongst French women and men in the eighteenth century with such sartorial gadget. Addison in a “satire of the coquettes”, published by The Spectator, describes it as the main weapon of high society women. From its primary use as a flyswatter, he will draw further purposes. But mostly, to encourage love affairs, for the fan aids the lady who is not allowed to engage in a conversation with a stranger but who, thanks to such object, will explore a body language enriched with a myriad of gallant significations. The pictorial and literary imagination that translates this social phenomenon in thus unveiled.

The purpose of this article is to examine the different variations of the mask as well as its limits in George Sand's Uscoque, a novel very rich in events that take place between Morea and Venice at the thme of the Turkish‐Venetian wars.

By the 1920s, the surrealists had claimed Fantômas as one of their literary ancestor because his mask makes him an icon of ambiguity. Masks give the surrealist characters the means to  overcome the contradictions of the conscious and unconscious minds. The surrealists incorporate masks into art and fiction not only to disguise secret identities but also to explore other identities. In this way, the masked character becomes an “anti‐Narcisse”, as André Breton said. From the standpoint of the imagination, mask is inestimably rich by its full poetic effect.

Wajdi Mouawad’s works focus mainly on the characters’ identity quest. The writing’s hardness shows the cruelty of war, which is a leitmotiv in Mouawad’s works, due to the Lebanese civil war that the author has knew in his childhood. In his first novel, Visage retrouvé, published in 2002, Mouawad exorcises the memory of the past by his telling of  Wahab’s story. This teenager found out, at his 14th birthday, that he couldn’t recognize his mother’s face anymore. This terrible loss will lead him to a dreamlike quest of the true face of his mother, which symbolizes the land of origins, the childhood and the lost tenderness. We have chosen to analyze this quest, in the light of the obsessive recurrence of images and words.

Nietzsche is one of those philosophers and thinkers – or even the philosopher, the thinker – who had the most inspiring influence upon Georges Bataille’s way of thinking as well as his existential choices. Among many Nietzschean concepts that are tenaciously present in Bataille’s work one – namely the Death of God – seems to be particularly persistent. This article aims to analyze some of representations of the dead God, the divine cadaver, in both religious and ideological sense in two of Bataille’s novels written before World War II: Story of the Eye and Blue of Noon.