The present article seeks to analyse the narrator’s role in Nancy Huston’s novel published in 1998, The Mark of the Angel. What is particular about the narrator in question are his cynical opinions that go against Huston’s ethos, emerging from her essays. Instead of being the author’s spokesperson, the narrator is only an element of the novel’s complex structure, which serves to implicitly show the man’s value, among different textual perspectives.

The article investigates two mysterious feminine figures appearing in the 13th century Old French prose romance Le Haut Livre du Graal (Perlesvaus). Their ontological status, which remains uncertain until the end, gives them, along with the sexual violence and castration phantasms they incarnate, a highly troubling and uncanny aspect. The analysis highlights also the textual strategies used by the author in order to create such an effect. 

The aim of this essay, divided into three parts, is to investigate the motif of journey, culture and identity in the novel La mano che non mordi by Ornela Vorpsi. The analysis is carried out in relation to different theories (Bergson, Kristeva, Lévinas). The travel to Sarajevo lets the main character, a woman who lives in France, discover important information on her identity which turns out to be difficult to determinate. The place evokes memories of her country: Albany. They present a cultural element sehir which means look at the others and undoubtedly depicts the mentality of Albanians.

The main aim of my article is to investigate, or simply to highlight the evolution of the twofold character of Surrealism-influenced, and later Surrealist, manifestos in three consecutive stages of the avant-garde movement in Romania. I apply the notion of the avant-garde manifesto developped by Benedikt Hjartarson in his essay “Myths of Rupture. The Manifesto and the Concept of Avant-Garde”, with the aim of taking a closer look at the anti-Surrealist Romanian manifestos of the mid-twenties, pre-Surrealist texts of the thirties, and the proper phase of the newly-established Romanian Surrealist Group’s discoveries in the forties.

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of certain episodes and motifs of Dante’s Purgatory which were partly inspired by the idea of the Otherworld and the category of space in the Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. In particular we examine the episode which takes place in the Valley of the Rulers (Pg. VII) and the concept of Dante’s Earthly Paradise to confront them with the idea of Virgilian Elysium. The intertextual dialogue of the Italian poet with the author of the Aeneid is sometimes polemical and based on aemulatio rather than on imitatio.

This article presents and confronts two views concerning the link between modernity and romanticism. On the one hand, the view proposed by the Nobel Prize winner, the Mexican Octavio Paz in his book Los hijos del limo. Del romanticismo a la vanguardia, and, on the other hand, the one put forward by the prolific Spanish writer Rafael Argullol in his El Héroe y el Único. El espíritu trágico del romanticismo. While for O. Paz the romantic movement as a child of modernity has inspired partially the modern search for the new in itself, for R. Argullol the romantic spirit is expression above all of a tragic-heroic mood of dissatisfaction with modernity. Both writers see the paradoxical nature of romanticism –sometimes longing for the past, sometimes dreaming about the future– as a complex expression of modernity’s self-awareness and self-criticism.

The purpose of this article is to analyze autobiographical components in the novel Le Page disgracié by Tristan L’Hermite, basing on the main criteria defined by Philippe Lejeune, Philippe Gasparini and René Demoris. It shows how the concept of ‘autobiographical pact’ and other cognate theories may only help to notice the complexity and variety of relations between literary fiction and biographical elements in Tristan L’Hermite’s work. In fact, by combining different esthetics and literary conventions, the uniqueness of this eclectic text seems make impossible to define its precise literary genre.