This dissertation examines the ways in which ecocritical perspectives on the relationship between human communities and the sum of their physical, social, political and cultural environments have been represented in a selection of twentieth and twenty-first century French and Francophone literary and cinematographic works. I study these works with the intention to understand in what ways the concept of cultivation, ranging from farming, to the aesthetically sculpted environments of pleasure gardens, to the agricultural plantations of the colonial past and today, to the conceptualization of the Earth as an infinite source of plenty awaiting global cultivation, are indicative of humanity's changing views and attitudes toward nature and the Other.

My dissertation investigates a number of novels and films--- Prisons et paradis (1932) by Colette, Au Hazard Balthazar (1966) by Robert Bresson, Un jardin de cure (1979) by Pierre Gascar, Je vois des jardins partout (2012) by Didier Decoin, L'esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1999) by Patrick Chamoiseau, Sauvage (2001) by Jacques Jouet, Globalia (2005) by Jean-Christophe Rufin and Home (2008) by Ursula Meier---in order to provide a panoramic view of shifting social, cultural and political attitudes toward nature, rurality, aesthetic lanscapes, the Other (as seen in plants, animals and the human subject in the colonial space), but also of themes correlated with globalization, pervasive aspects of technology and science, as well as forms of social disapproval or resistance to certain "progressive" mechanisms.