This dissertation defines fictional autobiographies as novels featuring a fictional character writing an autobiography, and it argues that these novels contribute to autobiographical theory. Whereas these texts have often been read as veiled accounts of the author’s life, reading them as fictional autobiographies shows that they recount an imaginary life in an autobiographical mode while sustaining a meta-reflective inquiry into the processes of autobiography. This research demonstrates how fictional autobiographies combine the distance of fiction and the specificity of life writing to illuminate the intersection of selfhood and narrative.

This project analyzes four French epistolary fictional autobiographies from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. The first chapter argues that the lackluster spiritual autobiography in Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s 1834 Volupté makes a case against rigid modes of interpretation, whether they be the conventions of the Christian life or of traditional literary criticism. The second chapter argues that Paul Bourget’s 1889 Le Disciple functions as a laboratory of moral thought, allowing an open-ended exploration of the moral responsibility of the writer in society. The third chapter argues that François Mauriac’s 1932 Le Nœud de vipères innovates the literary trope of religious conversion, by representing conversion in the present tense and emphasizing the role of writing in personal transformation. The fourth chapter argues that Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1951 Mémoires d’Hadrien presents a secular alternative to the Christian tradition of life writing by imagining the emperor Hadrian contemplating his life and approaching death through the lens of freedom.

Collectively, these fictional autobiographies represent the writing subject and the written autobiography as co-creative forces in identity formation. In each novel, life writing draws the subject into care of the self: an ethical quest for self-knowledge that challenges preexisting beliefs and offers new insights. Introspection brings the possibility of both self-knowledge and delusion. In these novels, the lack of response to autobiographical letters implies that what is missing is an interlocutor whose questions can prevent solipsism, which would mean that the self depends on others for self-knowledge. By dramatizing writing, these fictional autobiographies propose life writing as a spiritual exercise for secular times.

My dissertation asks why many French symbolists of the 1880s and 1890s thought that participation in poetry - both the production and the reading of it - ought to be restricted. Authors studied include Pierre Louÿs, Camille Mauclair, Charles Morice, Pierre Quillard, Henri de Régnier, Paul Valéry, and Francis Vielé-Griffin, as well as influential older authors such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. My corpus consists of the symbolists' poems, correspondence and, above all, their numerous literary journals. Several conservative contemporary critics held that, in rejecting readers, symbolists sought only notoriety and eventual canonicity. While such considerations play a role in my analysis, I also place the symbolists' rationales for restricting readership in terms of their various, often "idealistic" poetic aims. I additionally situate those rationales in the context of non-elitist symbolist attitudes that accorded at least superficial respect to popular instinct. Still, in a period of universalized education and mass printing, it was common to anticipate, above all, incomprehension from the distracted, newly literate masses. Symbolists valued intensive readers willing to embrace "difficult" texts; they associated such readers with the aristocratic old regime.

My first chapter establishes "concentration" as an overarching artistic and social value. Concentration has two relevant connotations, here: patient, concentrated effort in the rewriting and rereading of poetry, and the social concentration of the literary tradition in the hands of the few. The following chapters show how these two values were nuanced and sometimes flatly contradicted in other, equally "symbolist" discourse. The movement's extensive production of critical discourse on poetry was, itself, a source of ambivalence. Frequently scholarly themselves, symbolists decried pedantry and insisted on poetry's oral qualities. Poems were, furthermore, meant to be read without mediation by any form of commentary. In that sense, symbolists were still able at times to claim affinity with naïve (i.e. unmediated) popular poetic instinct. I conclude by contrasting this mistrust of critical commentary with the twentieth century's more frequent blurring of primary (poetic) and secondary (analytic) texts. Symbolists participated in but were, on the balance, ambivalent about trends contributing to poetry's increased "difficulty" and ties with the academy.