Night thoughts: The waking of the soul. The nocturnal contemplation of love, death, and the divine in the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century French epistolary novel and roman-memoire

In this study, I examine ten French epistolary novels and roman-memoires written by seven authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and explore how these works portray the nocturnal contemplation of love, death, and the divine as a source of both torment and cathartic healing. I place an emphasis on French women writers and the woman's voice, focusing on works by Claire de Duras, Adelaide de Souza, Juhanna de Krudener, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Sophie Cottin. As in Edward Young's Night Thoughts , my study is comprised of individual Nights, or chapters, and seeks to sound the elusive and eternal mysteries of Night. The literature of mid to late nineteenth-century France is deeply marked by nocturnal visions, reverie and dream; oneiric imagery abounds in the conte fantastiques of Nodier and Gautier, in the novels of Nerval, and in the verses of Verlaine and Rimbaud, to name but a few of the great French chef-d'oeuvres du reve. In this study, I am principally interested in texts that depict not the distant lands of dreams but the intimate paths of conscious night-thought, of nocturnal meditation, of lucid dreams, of irrational, tortured delirium, and of the mysterious state in which the conscious and subconscious meet and become one.; Much of my study is viewed through a phenomenological lens, since an understanding of the "Lebenswelt" (the lived world), of individual consciousness, and of personal experiences and impressions as they interface and collide with universal notions is key to unlocking the mysteries of nocturnal contemplation; authors such as Albert Beguin, Gaston Bachelard, Jean Starobinski, and Georges Poulet are central to my approach. Maurice Blanchot's writings are also significant in my study since his reflections on the paradoxes of presence and absence are germane to gaining a better understanding of the Night and night thoughts. My perspective is also largely archetypal or mythological since myth which is universal, timeless, and capable of expressing human truth on multiple levels, can serve as an important expression of the unsearchable and enigmatic ways of the nocturnal realm and experience.