https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/3365 Wed, 28 Oct 2026 03:25:35 GMT 2026-10-28T03:25:35Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150199 Title: Gothic mode-making : film adaptations of Victor Hugo’s The man who laughs Authors: Mallia, Marilyn Abstract: The visionary power of Victor Hugo’s late novel, The Man Who Laughs (L’Homme qui rit, 1869), resides in a potent triad of elements: its excessive, dark Romanticism, its grotesquely deformed protagonist, and its radical political charge. These elements engage with the core of the Gothic tradition, aligning the work decisively with a mode of literary expression defined by transgression, semantic excess, and troubled identities. Yet the novel remains a romanmonstre, a hybrid behemoth more frequently categorized as a historical or philosophical epic, while its profound Gothic undercurrents are often overshadowed by its sprawling ambition. It is precisely this overlooked Gothic core, however, that provides a most powerful imaginative framework for its cinematic translation, challenging filmmakers to transmute Hugo’s literary excess, existential weight, and corrosive political force into the aesthetic and cultural registers of a new medium and a new century. [excerpt] Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150199 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150045 Title: Flâneuse Abstract: The very existence of the flâneuse, a woman who roams the city alone, driven by curiosity, has often been questioned, even denied. Whereas Baudelaire envisions the male flâneur as a modern artist-figure, detached yet attuned to the fleeting rhythms of urban life, a female counterpart “was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century” (Wolff, 1985, p. 45), which closely associated female streetwalking with prostitution. However, pioneering female writers like George Sand in her autobiography Histoire de ma vie (1855) and Virginia Woolf in her essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1930), defied this erasure, documenting the liberating and inspiring power of aimless urban wandering for women. Decades later, film director Agnès Varda, a pivotal female figure in the male-dominated French New Wave movement of the 1960s, offers a powerful feminist reclaiming of the flâneuse figure in Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962). Varda leverages the era’s shift to on-location filming in Paris—“a place of unlimited possibility” (Douchet, 1999, p. 123)—to foreground the transformative potential of flânerie for her female protagonist. She charts the journey of a beautiful singer, Cléo, as she navigates Paris over two critical hours, literally from 5 to 7 p.m., while anxiously awaiting a biopsy result. Structured in 13 chapters and spanning Paris from the first to the thirteenth arrondissement, the film masterfully uses this condensed unity of time and space to depict Cléo’s evolution from a superficial existence to a state of profound self-awareness, through her emergent experience as a flâneuse. Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150045 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150044 Title: The dark thread : from tragical histories to gothic tales. Edited by John d. Lyons. (The early modern exchange.) Newark: University of Delaware press, 2019. 272 pp. [Book review] Authors: Mallia, Marilyn Abstract: This rich and wide-ranging collection of fourteen essays interrogates the widely held belief that gothic literature is a counter-reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, and investigates an ambitious alternative hypothesis. In the introduction and first chapter, volume editor John D. Lyons eloquently posits that the antecedents of the gothic go back to the tragic narratives of early modernity, and that, following Schillerian idealism’s redefinition of tragedy c. 1800, a number of rejected, long-standing tragic features were diverted into the gothic. The titular dark thread thus leads us through an extensive chronological, transnational, and intertextual voyage, which actively challenges generic boundaries. [excerpt] Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150044 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/143810 Title: Le procès de Fouquet ; Orléans et Bourgogne ; Eugénie et Charlotte : théâtre Authors: Morand, Paul; Lanni, Dominique Abstract: Poète novateur, grand romancier, brillant nouvelliste, Paul Morand fut aussi un dramaturge de talent. Dans Orléans et Bourgogne, il redonne vie à Isabeau de Bavière, épouse dévouée de Charles VI, roi fou d'une France affaiblie et convoitée. Dans Le Procès de Fouquet, il retrace l'arrestation, le procès et la condamnation iniques du surintendant des finances de Louis XIV, pour le plus grand des crimes : celui de lèse-majesté. Dans Eugénie et Charlatte, il met aux prises les deux impératrices qui précipitèrent la chute de l'éphémère empereur Maximilien. Dans une écriture somptueuse, via les destinées de figures historiques fortes, Paul Morand brosse de saisissants tableaux de régimes en pleine déliquescence: quand la Bourgogne était plus riche que la France, sous Louis XIY, au faîte de l'absolutisme, et sous Napoléon III, au temps de son rêve mexicain. Diplomate et grand voyageur, Paul Morand (1888- 1976) est L'auteur de récits de voyage, de romans, de recueils de nouvelles, de volumes de chroniques et d'œuvres dramatiques. ûs trois pièces sont inédites. Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/143810 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z