Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Actors – Great Britain – Correspondence'

This thesis explores the dynamics involved in shaping the Anglo-Syrian relationship. It argues that to understand UK relations towards Syria over the past century, they have to be viewed in the broader context of British policy on Middle East regional issues, and wider foreign policy priorities. With no direct interests invested in Syria, it is both Britain's continued involvement in Middle East affairs and Syria's standing as a key regional power that assures a continuing relationship. Consequently, the stance of leading UK politicians on the issues of post-World War regional order, international terrorism, military interventionism, arms sales, dictatorship and democratisation have circumscribed UK policy options in relation to Syria. Using the tools of Neoclassical realism this study considers British foreign policy behaviour, in terms of Britain's attempt to mobilize the power to protect its interests. It reviews Britain's international behaviour in part by how it is affected by changes in the international system, as Britain has declined from being a great imperial power, to a European power. Alliances are a key tool Britain has used to manage its decline, and this study identifies the impact that this has had on Anglo-Syrian relations with particular reference to the US and EU. Finally, it demonstrates that understanding how the foreign policy process works in Britain is key to understanding its international behaviour. In this it takes into account elite perceptions both of what these interests are and how best Britain can achieve them. This adds a layer of understanding as to why foreign policy outcomes do not always conform with what would be predicted purely in terms of the pursuit of the national interest.

This is a study of the letters of Anne, countess of Northumberland (1536–91) throughout her exile in the Low Countries from August 1570 until her death on 9 September 1591. The thesis draws on archival research and analysis of several hundred letters and associated documents, in English, Latin, Scots, French and cipher, spread across six British and European archives, to, from and about Anne and her contemporaries. The thesis includes an edition of the twenty-four extant letters written to and from Anne, in English and Latin, and images of these, as well as a newly published ODNB entry. Anne's letters offer evidence of an early modern woman directing and commanding the production and rhetorical construction of her correspondence and the gendered nature of her epistolary world. The thesis argues that she successfully represented herself and developed her agency despite (or in the context of) epistolary practices shaped heavily by men: male secretaries penned her letters, male addressees and male intelligencers intercepted and assessed the value of her correspondence. This thesis illuminates the physical ways that Anne authorised her letters as well as the rhetorical and linguistic strategies that she employed to assert her own power and negotiate her position in epistolary exchanges. After the introduction, which includes a biography of Anne, an overview of her letters and an outline of the theoretical framework of the thesis, there are three analytical chapters. Chapter One situates the letters in their socio-historical contexts to highlight how Anne negotiated the extreme circumstances of her exile to her own advantage: to access traditional reward-based patronage; to deploy informal shared experiences to sustain service and client bonds; and to establish a central position within the English exile community and the political network surrounding Mary, Queen of Scots. Chapter Two draws on techniques from manuscript studies and examines Anne's letters and the evidence they offer for their own composition, sending, reception and afterlife. This chapter reveals the benefits of close scrutiny of the physical and linguistic features of letters, adding detail to our understanding of women's use of letter-writing practices in the period. Chapter Three applies techniques from the field of historical pragmatics to analyse the rhetorical and linguistic strategies used in Anne's letters to bolster her own position by appropriating gender expectations to her own advantage while navigating social and interpersonal relationships embedded in epistolary exchanges. The thesis therefore, by drawing on different disciplinary techniques, offers us layers of insights into the letters. The picture that emerges is one that depicts not only Anne's agency but the processes through which her agency was constructed and enacted, according to the opportunities and limitations of her own culture and the extreme and exceptional circumstances of her own life.

This thesis involves a comprehensive study of the letters written by Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) to Colin Taylor from 1911 to 1929. Warlock first came into contact with Taylor at Eton in 1908 when he studied the piano with him as a schoolboy. Through Taylor's imaginative teaching during the next four years Warlock's interest in and understanding of music, particularly modern music, grew and matured. At the same time a strong bond of friendship developed between the two men and continued until Warlock's early death in 1930. This is clearly illustrated in the surviving 87 letters. Warlock was a great letter writer and over a thousand of them have been preserved, mostly in the British Library. His letters to Taylor have a special significance in that they were written during the entire period of his adult life, most of them during the early formative and creative years. They cover a wide range of topics including the influential friendships with the composers Frederick Delius and Bernard van Dieren, contemporary British and foreign music and his own work as a composer, writer, and scholar. They also give us many important insights into his life and personality, written as they are with rare candour and humour. In this thesis each letter has been carefully and systematically studied and the resulting information used to augment and expand the existing knowledge of Warlock's life and personality, his friendship with Taylor, his music and writings. Because of the wide field which the life and works of Peter Warlock cover, this study has been limited to subjects arising out of the correspondence with Taylor. Where necessary, additional information has been interpolated from other sources, mainly to give a sense of continuity and to explain references which might otherwise seem obscure. For a detailed study of Warlock's music readers are referred to Ian Copley's book, The Music of Peter Warlock, (Dennis Dobson, London, 1979). A definitive biography has yet to be written.

The thesis continues the work undertaken in recent years by (in alphabetical order) James J. Marino, Scott McMillin, Paul Menzer, Simon Palfrey, Tiffany Stern, Evelyn Tribble, and others to put to use what is now known about the purpose, distribution, and usage of early modern actors' parts. The thesis applies the new methodology of reading 'in parts', or reconstituting early modern plays 'in parts', to the body of plays written by Ben Jonson. The aim of the project is to offer a reconsideration of Jonson as a man of theatre, interested not only in the presentation of his works in print, but also in their production at the Globe and at Blackfriars. By reconstructing and examining the parts through which the actors performing in Jonson's plays accessed their characters, the thesis proposes answers to the questions: how can we read and analyse Jonson's plays differently when looking at them in terms of actors' parts; did Jonson write with parts in mind; what did Jonsonian parts have to offer actors by way of challenge and guidance; what can we learn from parts about Jonson's assumptions and demands with regard to the actors; and how did actors themselves respond to those demands. These questions are significant because they engage critically with the tradition of seeing Jonson as a playwright dismissive of actors and distrustful of the theatre; they seek to establish a perspective that allows us to assess Jonson's abilities to instruct and challenge his actors through staging documents. More generally, the research contributes to the studies of the early modern rehearsal and staging practices and invites consideration of Shakespeare's part-writing techniques in contrast with those of his major rival. With no surviving early modern parts from Jonson's plays (indeed with only a handful of surviving parts from the period), the first task is to determine the level of accuracy with which the parts can be reconstructed from Jonson's printed plays. Stephen Orgel was by no means the first critic who used the example of Sejanus to assert that Jonson habitually doctored his plays before they were published, but his view has become a critical commonplace. This thesis re-examines the case of Jonson's revisions and concludes that, far from being representative, the 1605 Sejanus quarto is an anomaly which Jonson himself needed to account for in his address to the reader. It is true that Jonson cultivated a distinct style of presentation of printed material, but the evidence that he extensively tampered with the texts themselves after they were performed is scarce (again, the revisions found in the Folio versions of Every Man in His Humour and Cynthia's Revels are addressed and found to be exceptional, rather than typical), while the evidence of his pride in the original compositions and performances is much stronger. Since such enhancements as dedicatory poems, arguments (i.e. plot summaries), character sketches, or marginalia have no bearing on the shapes of actor's parts, they do not in any way compromise the reliability of the printed texts as sources from which Jonson's parts can, argues the thesis, be reconstructed with reasonable accuracy. Jonson, himself an actor and apparently a friend and admirer of a number of great actors of his age (Edward Alleyn, Nathan Field, Richard Robinson, Salomon Pavy, Richard Burbage), knew from personal experience how much depended on actors mastering, or, in their terminology, being 'perfect' in, their parts. By granting the actor access only to select portions of the complete play-text (i.e. his own lines and cues), the part effectively regulated the performance in cases when the actor had only limited knowledge of the rest of the play. Such cases seem to have been very common: documentary evidence suggests that actors had to learn their parts on their own over the course of a few weeks, and only then attended group rehearsals, most of which were concerned with 'business', not text which had already been learned. While some might have attended a reading of the play (if one was arranged for the benefit of the sharers, for instance), or gained more information about the play from their fellow actors, the parts remained their chief means of internalising their text and acquiring a sense of the play they were in. Jonson, who was not a resident playwright with any company performing in London and thus probably did not always have easy and regular access to the actors, could sometimes have taken advantage of the actors' dependence on their parts and crafted the parts as a means of exercising control over the performances of his plays. Building on this premise, the thesis examines various features of actors' parts that would have made a difference to an actor's performance. It draws on recent advancements in the studies of textual cohesion (linguistic features such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, etc.) to point out how the high and low frequency of cohesive ties (pairs of cohesively related words or phrases) in various sections of the part would have given an actor a good idea of how prominent his part was at any given moment. It examines Jonson's use of cues and patterns of cueing: like Shakespeare, Jonson was fond of using repeated cues to open up a space for improvisation, and he seems to have been aware of the need to provide the apprentices in the company with parts cued by a limited number of actors so as to allow for easier private rehearsals with their masters. The thesis also examines the common feature of Jonson's 'split jokes' - jokes that are divided across multiple parts - and asks whether any kind of comic effect can be achieved by excluding the punch line of a joke from the part that contains its setup, and the setup from the part that delivers the punch line, offering a fresh look at the nature of early modern comedy. In structural terms, the thesis considers how a narrative constituted solely by the lines present on an actor's part can diverge from the narrative of the play as a whole and how an understanding of a play as a text composed of actors' parts, as well as of acts and scenes, can help to refine arguments about Jonson's assumptions about the strengths of the companies for which he wrote. What emerges is an image of Jonson who, far from concerned only with readership, consciously developed a brand of comedy that was uniquely suited to, perhaps even relying on, the solipsistic manner in which the actors received and learned their parts.

This thesis collects, transcribes, and, with reference to household documents and contemporary literature, annotates and interprets the surviving correspondence of a constellation of seven upper servants who at various points in the second half of the sixteenth century were stationed at or moved between several country houses and estates of which Bess of Hardwick was mistress. The thesis finds that the extant correspondence of Bess’s servants falls into two categories: (1) letters of management exchanged between Bess and five of her household and estate officers (Francis Whitfield, James Crompe, William Marchington, and Edward Foxe at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire and nearby estates in the 1550s-1560s, and Nicholas Kynnersley at Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire in the late 1580s) and (2) letters seeking practical and political patronage, written in the early 1580s by two of Bess’s gentle-born personal attendants, William Marmyon and Frances Battell, to contacts outside Bess’s itinerant (and at that time politically vulnerable) household. Close literary, linguistic (historical pragmatic), and material readings reveal that all these letters adapt and surpass conventional expressions as they engage in practical problem-solving, complex interpersonal exchanges, and domestic politics. The thesis argues that the manuscript letters materialise dynamic verbal performances of their writers’ specific social roles and relationships — the mistress-servant relationship foremost among them. Each writer simultaneously registers and renegotiates his or her own experience of the mistress-servant relationship through the combination of diverse epistolary features, which include verbal etiquette and page layout, degrees of directness or circumlocution, complexity of syntax, tone, use of emotive language, discourses of pleasure and displeasure, personalised content (which ranges from in-jokes to empathy to distinctive pen flourishes), and explicit expressions of authority or loyalty, as well as job-specific terminology and subject matter. Frequency of correspondence, modes of delivery, and the afterlives of letters are shown to carry further social significance. The correspondence of Bess of Hardwick’s servants acts as a touchstone for the complex role of letter-writing in the formation of social selves and the performance of domestic duties in sixteenth-century England. By accurately transcribing these letters, interpreting them using a unique combination of literary, linguistic, and visual analysis, and reconstructing from these letters and additional archival sources the careers of several servants of one mistress, this thesis opens up new material, perspectives, questions, and methods for early modern cultural studies.

During the third year of the Great War 1914-1918 Russia experienced the upheaval of revolution, precipitating the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and installation of the Provisional Government in March, and culminating in the Bolshevik takeover of November, 1917. Due to the political, military, and economic chaos which accompanied the revolution Russia was unable to continue the struggle on the eastern front. Russia was not fighting the war against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary alone, however, and her threat to capitulate was of the gravest concern to her Allies, Great Britain and France. In fact the disintegration of Russia's war effort was the pivotal issue around which Anglo-Russian relations revolved in 1917. Britain's war policy was dominated by the belief that the eastern front had to be maintained to achieve victory. It appeared that any interruption to the eastern front would allow Germany to reinforce her lines on the western front, then to win and control the economic destiny of Europe. Britain could not allow this to happen. This study focuses on the reportage from British diplomats and representatives in and outside of Russia to their superiors at the Foreign Office in London from December 1916 to December 1917. A vast wealth of documentation is available in the Foreign Office Correspondence. Analysis of these notes reveals certain trends which were dictated by the kaleidoscopic turn of events in Russia and the national ethos of these representatives. A minute analysis demonstrates a great diversity of opinion regarding the situation in Russia, ranging from optimism to pessimism and objectivity to prejudice in all phases of the year 1917. To a limited degree this diversity can be correlated with the geographical location and diplomatic status of the individual representatives. Above all it is clear that when historians quote from these sources, they choose the quotations which support the conclusions they have already reached because they know the outcome of the developments that they are describing. The individuals on the spot at the time were far less prescient and insightful. They were much more affected by their own historical prejudices and rumours, as well as the vagaries and short-term shifts of their immediate environment. Many of them believed in the great-man theory of history; a number attributed all developments and difficulties to some aspect of the Russian national character; some explained certain events during the year by conspiracies, especially of the Jews, with whom they tended to equate the Bolsheviks. Only a few were consistently solid and realistic in their appraisal of events, attributing them to factors favoured by our most respected historians.
Arts, Faculty of
History, Department of
Graduate

The creation of the National Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Parliament in 1999 was accompanied with an aspiration that these new institutions would allow Scotland and Wales to develop their own policies, better suited to local needs than those designed in Westminster or Whitehall. This thesis explores policy-making in the first terms of the devolved institutions in Scotland and Wales, focusing on where the policies developed by these institutions diverged from those pursued at Westminster. Policy divergence is examined by studying the development of the financing long-term care for the elderly policies. The aim of this thesis is to identify why policy divergence occurred in the long-term care case, considering the impact of actors (or agents) and the institutional setting in which they operate, as suggested by Scharpf's model of actor-centred institutionalism. As actor-centred institutionalism suggested, both actors and institutions played a major role in shaping policy responses. In the Scottish case a range of actors cooperated and lobbied together for the introduction of free personal care, spurred on by the First Minister, who created an opportunity for those in favour of free personal care to pressurise his government to introduce the policy. In contrast, in Wales, actors were divided and never built up the same momentum to ensure the introduction of a more generous long-term care package. The institutional setting in which these actors operated was a major factor in shaping their policy preferences and the strategies they adopted to achieve them. This thesis considers the impact on policy-making of the devolved institution's electoral system, financial and legislative powers, design of the institutions, and the place of these institutions in a UK setting. The different institutional structures in Scotland and Wales provided different incentives and resources for actors, encouraged different styles of policy-making from Westminster and affected the way in which issues were framed. Examining the roles of actors and institutions in the formation of distinctive policies highlighted that in the real world these two elements are mutually dependent and cannot be separated. As a result it is impossible, and pointless, to determine whether actors or institutions were most influential on the development of distinctive policies. Instead this thesis explores how the difference between the configurations of actors and institutions in Scotland and Wales contributed to the creation of policies which were distinctive both from each other and the UK Government.

Lone-parent families were in the news in 1993 as never before. The Child Support Agency, and the question of lone-parent families' entitlement to state support were the feature of many news reports. This study examines this media coverage and, using concepts from agenda-setting and issue definition literature, examines the roles that political actors have played in the construction of these media reports. A content analysis of a complete sample of 77ie Times and 7he Sunday Times comprises the primary analytical method, with a policy process framework organising the analysis. It has been found that government ministers played the greatest part in setting the media agendas for these and other issues. It seems that other actors can be successful in shaping coverage, however, if they make use of certain tactics, particularly if they provide 'ready-packaged' stories to journalists that combine a human interest element (involving 'real' people) with a political slant. By mobilising on a mass level absent fathers were able to provide such stories and were thus able to take control of press coverage of the Child Support Agency. The lone parents' groups Gingerbread and the National Council for One Parent Families, on the other hand, found mobilisation and particularisation more difficult due to the social and economic situation of their client group - nine out of ten lone parents are women, and around eight out of ten claim income support benefits - and for this reason were less successful in shaping either coverage of the Child Support Agency, or of lone-parent families and their right to state support.

My thesis investigates the dialogic aspects and literary qualities ascribed to letters during the long eighteenth century. In part this involves documenting the correspondence between letters and other genres, such as the novel. Being in correspondence encouraged writers such as Burney and Johnson to express the relationship between sender and recipient in interesting ways. I posit that the letter offered a sophisticated means for writers, including those in Richardson's circle, to represent speech and thought, and mimic (with varying degrees of indirection), that of others. I consider the editorial habits and typographical conventions that governed letter-writing during the period, honing in on Richardson's contributions. I link his claim that letters were written 'to the Moment' with broader tropes of 'occasional' style, and show how this manifests in letters' intricate modulations of tense and person. Chapter 1 details the conventions that prevailed in letters of the period, and their interactions with irony and innovation. I compare convention in the epistolary novels of Smollett and Richardson, and look at closure in the Johnson-Thrale correspondence. Chapter 2 demonstrates that various methods of combining one's voice with others were utilized in letters (such as those of the Burney family), including some that took advantage of the epistolary form and its reputation as 'talking on paper'. Chapter 3 shows the role of mimesis in maintaining the dialogic structure of letters, and links it to contemporary theories of sympathy and sentiment. Chapters 4 and 5 apply the findings about epistolary tradition, polyphony and sentimentalism to the letters of Sterne and Burns. In them, there is a mixture of sentiment and irony, and of individual and 'correspondent' styles. The conclusion discusses the editing of letters, both in situ and in preparation for publication. The twin ideals of spontaneity and sincerity, I conclude, have influenced the way we choose to edit letters in scholarly publications.

Following recent critical work on writers' representations of sociability in Romantic literature, this thesis examines in detail the textual strategies (such as allusion, acts of address, and the use of 'coterie' symbols or references) which writers used to seek to establish a friendly or sympathetic relationship with a particular reader or readers, or to create and define a sense of community identity between readers. The thesis focuses on specific relationships between pairs and groups of writers (who form one another's first readers), and examines 'sociable' genres like letters, manuscript albums, occasional poetry, and periodical essays in a diverse series of author case-studies (Anna Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, John Keats and Leigh Hunt). Such genres, the thesis argues, show how manuscript and print culture could frequently overlap and intersect, meaning that writers confronted the demands of two co-existing audiences - one private and familiar, the other public and unknown - in the same work. Rather than arguing that writers used manuscript culture practices and produced 'coterie' works purely to avoid confronting their anxieties about publishing in the commercial sphere of print culture, the thesis suggests that in producing such 'coterie' works writers engaged with and reflected contemporary philosophical and political concerns about the relationship between the individual and wider communities. In these works, writers engaged with the legacy of eighteenth-century philosophical ideas about the role (and limitations) of the sympathetic imagination in maintaining social communities, and with interpretative theories about the best kind of reader. Furthermore, the thesis argues that reading literary texts in the specific, material context in which they are 'published' to particular readers, either in print, manuscript, or letters, is vital to understanding writer/reader relationships in the Romantic period. This approach reveals how within each publication space, individual texts could be placed (either by their writers, by editors, or by other readers) in meaningful relationships with other texts, absorbing or appropriating them into new interpretative contexts.

The dissertation argues that the development of the British abolition movement was based on the abolitionists' perception that their actions were kairotic; they attempted to shape their own kairos by taking temporal events and reinterpreting them to construct a kairotic process that led to a perceived fulfillment: abolition. Thus, the dissertation examines the rhetorical strategies used by white abolitionists to construct an abolitionist kairos that was designed to produce salvation for white Britons more than it was to help free blacks. The dissertation especially examines the three major texts produced by black persons living in England during the late eighteenth centuryIgnatius Sancho's Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (1782), Ottobauh Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787), and Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)to illustrate how black rhetoric was appropriated by whites to fulfill their own kairotic desires. By examining the rhetorical strategies employed in both white and black rhetorics, the dissertation illustrates how the abolitionists thought the movement was shaped by, and how they were shaping the movement through, kairotic time. While the dissertation contends that the abolition movement was rhetorically designed to provide redemption, and thus salvation, it illustrates that the abolitionist's intent was not merely to save the slave, but to redeem blacks first in the eyes of white Christians by opening blacks to an understanding and acceptance of God. Perhaps more importantly, abolitionists would use black salvation to buy back their own souls and the soul of their nation in the eyes of God in order to regain their own salvation lost in the slave trade. But ironically, they had to appear to be saving others to save themselves. So white abolitionists used the black narratives to persuade their overwhelmingly white audience that slavery was as bad for them as it was for the African slave. And in the process, a corpus of black writing was produced that gives current readers two glimpses of one world.

The research investigated the perspectives of the management team on strategies in managing a British college with a mainly South African market, namely Blake Hall College (BHC). The study aimed to identify teaching methods used at the college to be competitive in the distance education and higher education market. The approach was qualitative. Eight participants were purposefully selected and interviewed by means of an interview schedule that focused on management and teaching methods in particular. Information was also collected on quality assurance and cooperation between BHC and other higher education institutions. The results illustrated the influences of institutional growth and progress, maintenance, management structure and leadership, quality control, collaboration and communication. Regarding teaching methods, the advantages and disadvantages of distance education and face-to-face methods were illuminated. Participants also described a number of innovative teaching methods used. From the aforementioned, recommendations were made for surviving the competitive higher education market.
Educational Studies
M.Ed (Educational Management)

Ce mémoire est une étude d’un cas de rapprochement entre deux pays. Pendant la guerre de Crimée, la Grande-Bretagne s’allia à la France du Second Empire. Ennemie traditionnelle, la France est toujours considérée comme une menace. La coopération forcée entre les deux pays, résultat des circonstances, est à la base de la présente recherche. Des milliers de militaires et de civils des deux pays travaillèrent ensemble pendant deux ans. Les correspondances britanniques révèlent une fraternisation plus importante que ce qui est relevé dans l’historiographie. D’après les théories de Gordon Allport sur la diminution des préjugés, toutes les conditions nécessaires à un rapprochement se retrouvaient en Crimée. Les étapes, définies par Allport, qui mènent à cette fraternisation se perçoivent aussi dans les lettres personnelles. Ce rapprochement eut des conséquences sous-estimées : les Britanniques se comparèrent aux Français et leur fierté céda la place à une importante autocritique. Cela déclencha des controverses dans l’armée et dans les journaux dès le début de la guerre, longtemps avant les scandales de l’hiver 1854-1855.
In the Crimean war, Great-Britain made an alliance with the Second French Empire, the traditional enemy, still considered as a threat; this cooperation, forced by circumstances, forms the basis of this research. Thousands of soldiers and civilians from both countries worked together for two years. The British personal letters reveal a fraternization between both cultures that is more important than the one mentioned in the historiography. According to Gordon Allport’s theories on the diminution of prejudices, all the necessary conditions for reconciliation could be found in Crimea. The steps leading to the fraternization, defined by Allport, are also perceptible in the personal letters. This reconciliation had under-estimated consequences: British soldiers and civilians started comparing themselves with the French and their pride gave place to an important self-criticism. This led to scandals in the army and the newspapers from the very beginning of the war, long before the scandals of the winter 1854-1855.

Ce mémoire est une étude d’un cas de rapprochement entre deux pays. Pendant la guerre de Crimée, la Grande-Bretagne s’allia à la France du Second Empire. Ennemie traditionnelle, la France est toujours considérée comme une menace. La coopération forcée entre les deux pays, résultat des circonstances, est à la base de la présente recherche. Des milliers de militaires et de civils des deux pays travaillèrent ensemble pendant deux ans. Les correspondances britanniques révèlent une fraternisation plus importante que ce qui est relevé dans l’historiographie. D’après les théories de Gordon Allport sur la diminution des préjugés, toutes les conditions nécessaires à un rapprochement se retrouvaient en Crimée. Les étapes, définies par Allport, qui mènent à cette fraternisation se perçoivent aussi dans les lettres personnelles. Ce rapprochement eut des conséquences sous-estimées : les Britanniques se comparèrent aux Français et leur fierté céda la place à une importante autocritique. Cela déclencha des controverses dans l’armée et dans les journaux dès le début de la guerre, longtemps avant les scandales de l’hiver 1854-1855.
In the Crimean war, Great-Britain made an alliance with the Second French Empire, the traditional enemy, still considered as a threat; this cooperation, forced by circumstances, forms the basis of this research. Thousands of soldiers and civilians from both countries worked together for two years. The British personal letters reveal a fraternization between both cultures that is more important than the one mentioned in the historiography. According to Gordon Allport’s theories on the diminution of prejudices, all the necessary conditions for reconciliation could be found in Crimea. The steps leading to the fraternization, defined by Allport, are also perceptible in the personal letters. This reconciliation had under-estimated consequences: British soldiers and civilians started comparing themselves with the French and their pride gave place to an important self-criticism. This led to scandals in the army and the newspapers from the very beginning of the war, long before the scandals of the winter 1854-1855.

The main purpose of this thesis is to present the biography of Arthur Wellesley, the first duke of Wellington (1769-1852) with the connection to his political career in the top political offices primarily in the years 1815-1832. With the respect to the way how Wellington concerned to his political negotiations, this thesis also try to look at the duke's childhood and adolescence. Based on the chronological order the large area of the thesis especially attends to the British facts, which comes close to us through the Wellington's political activity. This work deals with the key political issues incidental to the duke's career, e.g. Bill of Pains and Penalties, Catholic Emancipation, or Parliamentary Reform. We can come to the conclusion that his key political attitudes which had a great impact on his decisions were "the service to the state and the King", "non-party feeling in political debates", and "the demand of a discipline", not only for himself, but for his colleagues and subordinates too. Key words: Arthur Wellesley, the duke of Wellington, biography, Great Britain, the 1st half of the 19th century, political history, correspondence

In the nineteenth century, theatre and newspapers were the dominant expressions of popular culture in the northeastern United States, and together formed a crucial discursive node in the ongoing negotiation of American national identity. Focusing on the five decades between 1820 and 1870, during which touring stars from Great Britain enjoyed their most lucrative years of popularity on United States stages, this dissertation examines three instances in which English performers entered into this nationalizing forum and became flashpoints for journalists seeking to define the nature and bounds of American citizenship and culture. In 1821, Edmund Kean’s refusal to perform in Boston caused a scandal that revealed a widespread fixation among social elites with delineating the ethnic and economic limits of citizenship in a republican nation. In 1849, an ongoing rivalry between the English tragedian William Charles Macready and his American competitor Edwin Forrest culminated in the deadly Astor Place riot. By configuring the actors as champions in a struggle between bourgeois authority and working-class populism, the New York press inserted these local events into international patterns of economic conflict and revolutionary violence. Nearly twenty years later, the arrival of the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe in 1868 drew rhetoric that reflected the popular press’ growing preoccupation with gender, particularly the question of woman suffrage and the preservation of the United States’ international reputation as a powerfully masculine nation in the wake of the Civil War. Three distinct cultural currents pervade each of these case studies: the new nation’s anxieties about its former colonizer’s cultural influence, competing political and cultural ideologies within the United States, and the changing perspectives and agendas of the ascendant popular press. Exploring the points where these forces intersect, this dissertation aims to contribute to an understanding of how popular culture helped shape an emerging sense of American national identity. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that in the mid-nineteenth century northeastern United States, popular theatre, newspapers, and audiences all contributed to a single media formation in which controversial English performers became a rhetorical antipode against which “American” identity could be defined.
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