Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'History, 1850-1920'

Using a series of interlocking case-studies, this thesis investigates environmental anxieties in New Zealand�s settler society in the period 1830-1920. A central premise of this study is that the rapid environmental transformation of New Zealand stimulated widespread anxieties and reforms within settler society. These anxieties focussed as much on the changes already begun as on apprehensions of the results of these changes. Applying the concept of environmental anxiety to settler New Zealand expands understandings about colonial culture and its environmental history. It moves debate beyond simple narratives of colonial environmental destruction. Instead, this thesis highlights the ambiguities and complexities of colonial views of the natural world. This thesis points to the insecurities behind seeming Victorian confidence, even arrogance, in the ability of science and technology to bring constant material improvement. Europeans recognised that modern living brought material advantages but that the rapid environmental changes that underpinned these improvements also brought and threatened to bring unwanted outcomes. A diverse range of settlers worried about the effects of environmental changes. Individuals, institutions, committees, councils, doctors, scientists, artists, governments, engineers and politicians expressed environmental anxieties of one kind or another. Some farmers, politicians and scientists held that deforestation decreased rainfall but increased temperatures. Other scientists and politicians feared that it brought devastating floods and soil erosion. Some Maori, travellers, politicians and scientists held that it destabilised sand that would inundate fertile fields. Councillors, engineers and doctors constantly debated ways of improving the healthiness of towns and cities, areas seen as particularly dangerous places in which to live. Doctors� and settlers� anxieties focused on the effects of New Zealand�s climate on health and racial development. The impact of environmental change on the healthiness of certain areas, as well as the role played by humans in climate change, also provoked lively discussion. The effects of these anxieties are evident in some of the land policies, artworks, legislation, parliamentary and scientific debates, and writings of this period. Settlers believed curbing pollution, laying out parks, planting trees and restricting the construction of unhealthy properties improved living conditions in cities. Some scientists and politicians thought setting aside forest �climate reserves� in highland areas, tree-planting legislation and sustainable forestry practices prevented flooding and climate change. Individuals and authorities also established sanatoria and spas in particularly healthy spots, such as at the seaside and in high, dry places. In investigating these topics, this thesis expands the discipline of environmental history, bringing to light the importance of studying urban environments, aesthetics, climate change, desertification and health. It expands the largely �national� narratives of New Zealand�s environmental histories by acknowledging that local environments, events and attitudes as well as global environments, events and attitudes shaped anxieties and policies. Global ideas, often operating at a local level, played a role in reinforcing and providing solutions to New Zealand�s environmental anxieties. This thesis also acknowledges the on-going significance of Christianity in under-girding ideas about improvement and environmental protection. Most significantly, perhaps, this study underlines both that many settlers displayed an emotional attachment to the New Zealand environment and that most colonists wanted to ensure the long-term productivity of its lands.

The thesis investigates the factors determining the effort put forth by industrial workers in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Why was so much energy and of such kinds put into work, and neither more nor less? What was the contribution of culture and institutions? And in which ways, if any, did the conduct of labour change over time? Labour effort contributes significantly to productivity differentials, between factories and across nations, and its study thus sheds light on that slackening of Britain's economic performance which historians have detected in the late Victorian period. Yet it is, additionally, a subject of interest in its own right. Work was the preponderating element in a man's daily experience, and much of the wide range of factory life found reflection in the matter of how hard he laboured and in what way. Indeed it is the contention of this thesis that an explanation of the level and forms of effort in the late nineteenth century must make reference to the workshop environment and its associated customs and social relationships. These arguments are illustrated by detailed studies of the shoe and flint-glass trades. Despite obvious contrasts between these industries, important similarities are found to exist in the issues surrounding labour effort. In both industries operatives limited output; shoe and glass employers alike contributed to the failure to fully realise the productive potential of their establishments; the social equilibrium of both industries was subject to mounting competition from overseas - a challenge compounded in the shoe trade by rapid technical change; and in each case these disruptive tendencies eventuated in industrial confrontations which, however apparently successful for employers, left the fundamental characteristics of industrial organisation unchanged. These themes were common, not merely to glass and shoe manufacture, but to a range of major industries. The culture of output limitation was, we conclude, widespread in industry in this period, and emerged from similar reasons out of similar contexts.

À la charnière entre deux siècles, Salomé fait office de lieu commun inévitable de la littérature et des arts. Cependant, aux côtés de la femme fatale, s'affirme la présence discrète mais tout aussi inévitable de la féminité fragile et bienveillante, formée sur le modèle de la princesse de conte et de l'héroïne de roman gothique, mais surtout sur celui de la vierge et martyre du roman édifiant, qu'il soit antiquisant ou contemporain. Parfois discrète jusqu'à l'illisibilité, cet archétype n'est légitimé dans sa fonction bienveillante que par un sacrifice. La signification religieuse du bouc émissaire reste à la fois lisible et efficace dans les structures narratives du roman, mais aussi dans le détail de l'écriture de ces personnages. Les figures mariales, magdaléennes ou féeriques sont soumises à la même épreuve de destruction, par laquelle l'édification qu'elles symbolisent se fait littéralement construction de sens, juxtaposition d'éléments esthétiques disparates mais efficaces par lesquels un personnage en vient à représenter allégoriquement la création artistique elle-même. En reliant le milieu du XIXe siècle aux années 1920 et en mettant les plus connus des héritiers de Baudelaire en perspective avec ceux dont le nom commence à peine à revenir à la postérité, l'enjeu de la recherche est d'établir dans quelle mesure ces représentations de la féminité bienveillante relèvent d'une permanence, d'un monument – au sens de monumentum – où la fin de siècle va non seulement contempler la mort d'une époque révolue, mais concentrer tout ce qui sert, à l'aube du XXe siècle, à théoriser l'art idéaliste<br>At the crossroads between two centuries, Salome plays the part of a mandatory commonplace in art and literature. Nevertheless, next to the femme fatale and just as unavoidable, stands a fragile and benevolent form of feminity, molded in the cast of the fairytale princess and theGothic novel heroine, but inspired above all by the Virgin and Martyr of the edifying novel, be it antique or contemporary. As it might be discrete enough to become unreadable, this archetype's benevolence cannot be legitimated without a sacrifice. The religious meaning of the scapegoat remains just as obvious and as efficient in the novels' narrative structure, as well as in the detailsthrough which such characters are built. Marial, magdalenian and farylike characters must undergo the same destruction trial, through which their edifying meaning becomes a litteral building-up up meaning, by juxtaposing dissimilar and yet efficien aesthetic elements which turn the character into an allegory of artistic creation. By linking mid-19th century and the 1920es and by weaving a link between the most famous of Baudelaire's heirs and the ones whose name is just merging out of oblivion, the purpose of this study is to analyse how much these representations of benevolent femininity must be seen as a permanence, as a monument – or as a monumentum – where late-19th century will not only gaze a the death of a declining era, but concentrate all what will be used to theorize idealist artistic movements on the edge of the 20th century

"Reading Costume Design" identifies and theorizes an important shift in costume practices: in the mid-nineteenth century, it was common for actors to wear their own clothing onstage or to choose a garment from a theatre's generic stock, without coordination with other costumes or attention to the particular demands of a role. By the early twentieth century, however, costume was firmly established as an expressive artistic tool in building a character and shaping the complete theatrical experience, overseen by a professional designer who routinely received credit in the program. By focusing on this specific moment, my dissertation reclaims theatrical costume as an object of theoretical inquiry (a text), while maintaining its place as an object of material culture, fully embedded in a particular historical context. I use the figure of the professional costume designer - and her rising prominence across the performing arts after 1880 - as a lens to focus on the changing relationship between the stage, fashion, and visual culture. "Reading Costume Design" argues that this historical shift reveals an important change in the status of costumes: from craft to art. At the beginning of my period, costumes impressed audiences as bravura displays of wealth, spectacle, or craftsmanship; by 1920, theatre practitioners and audience members viewed costume as an expressive art form, and its designer as an artist. As art objects, costumes acquired additional semiotic value, conveying new kinds of information to spectators. Designers created costumes for audiences to "look through" - reading costumes not only for their surface beauty or accuracy but also for commentary or reflection upon the text or overall performance. As a form of expression in their own right, costumes interacted in more collaborative or critical ways with the literary and musical texts. I contend that in this fertile period, four kinds of artists made key contributions to this expanded expressive model of costume design: performers, directors, couturiers, and painters. I use the term "proto-designer" to denote these artists, who helped to shape the profession of costume design from adjacent fields. Each of my four chapters studies one type of proto-designer, focusing on two or three significant examples. Major figures discussed include Georg II of Saxe-Meinengan, Richard Wagner, Marietta Piccolomini, Ellen Terry, Lucy Duff-Gordon (Lucile), Paul Poiret, Edward Gordon Craig, Leon Bakst, and Pablo Picasso. "Reading Costume Design" shows how theatrical Modernism established norms of costume design that are still with us today, analyzing the consolidation of costume choices into the hands of one individual (the designer) as part of Modernism's investment in the single artistic consciousness. This project highlights the importance of costume design as an object of study, able to move across different genres within the performing arts (theatre, dance, opera) and to offer fresh perspectives on fields such as theatre history, media and celebrity studies, art history, gender studies, aesthetics, and material culture.

abstract: ABSTRACT Art historians typically consider Chinese porcelain a decorative art, resulting in scholars spending little time analyzing it as a fine art form. One area that is certainly neglected is porcelain produced during the late 19th and early 20th century during the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) into the early Republic period (1912–1949). As the Qing dynasty weakened and ultimately fell in 1911, there was a general decline in the quantity of porcelain produced in China. Due to this circumstance, porcelain of this era has not received the detailed analysis, characterization of styles, comprehension of themes, and understanding of patronage evident in other periods of Chinese porcelain production. Ultimately, limited research has been conducted to establish the styles associated with late dynastic porcelain into the early Republic’s establishment. This dissertation utilizes a new perspective that considers the patronage of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) as a high point of late dynastic porcelain. Concrete documentation establishes that motifs were appropriated from Cixi’s painting, suggesting a direct connection between schools of painting and the imagery selected for porcelain during her reign. The porcelain Cixi influenced directly guided the porcelain produced during the Hongxian era (1915-1916), making Cixi’s patronage the key turning point from dynastic porcelain to early Republic porcelain. Utilizing predominately British collections, this study identifies the styles, symbols, and themes associated with porcelain of the 19th and 20th century, elevating late dynastic and early Republic wares to the status of fine art.<br>Dissertation/Thesis<br>Doctoral Dissertation Art History 2019