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Shank, Ashley C. "Composers as Storytellers: The Inextricable Link Between Literature and Music in 19th Century Russia." University of Akron / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1290275047.
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Possehl, Suzanne René. "A women's journal, or, The birth of a Cosmo girl in 19th-century Russia /." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=20175.
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This thesis examines the role nineteenth-century women's literary journals, specifically Ladies' Journal (1823--1833), played in the development of Russian literature. The longest-lived and most-circulated of the pre-Soviet women's literary journals, Ladies' Journal was well-positioned to have contributed to the on-going formation of a national literature through its influence on the Russian woman writer and reader. Ladies' Journal served as a forum for new Russian women writers and translators. It also promoted the discussion of women's issues. However, Ladies' Journal had a contradictory editorial policy concerning women and literature. While advocating women stake their own ground as writers, Ladies' Journal modeled the type of writer it wanted. The ideal writer was the inspiration of male poets and did not differ from the Romantic heroine or the ideal Romantic woman. This was a gesture in the spirit of the time, but it had consequences for Russian literature and for the poetics and politics of Russian women's journals to come.
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林英霞 and Insia Lin. "The mentality of the Russian intelligentsia as seen through the novelsof Dostoyevsky and Turgenev." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2002. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31227612.
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Magerski, Christine 1969. "The constitution of the literary field in Germany after 1871 : Berlin modernism, literary criticism and the beginnings of the sociology of literature." Monash University, German Studies, 2002. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8724.
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Elbaum, Henry. "Rhetoric and fiction : interaction of verbal genres in the Soviet literature of the twenties and thirties." Thesis, McGill University, 1988. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=75698.
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Soviet literature of the twenties and thirties is examined in the present study in its relationship to other verbal genres, primarily, the speeches of Party leaders, newspaper rhetoric and political posters. The first four chapters of the dissertation focus on such topics as the reception of Marxist-Leninist discourse by peasants and workers as well as its representation in fiction; the refraction of official discursive formulas in characters' speech and the dialogization of Party rhetoric; the integration of political documents into fiction and their structural function. Particular attention is paid to the way the contamination of Party rhetoric by substandard language and its contextual defamiliarization lead, depending on the overall authorial intention, either to a parodic subversion of official cliches or to the internalization of didactic discourse and the enhancement of its communicative effectiveness.The theme of industrialization is examined in the last two chapters of the thesis in its dialectic interaction with various Neo-Rousseauist conceptions, which either reflect the authors' own ambivalence about socialist construction, or constitute a rhetorical device used in order to reinforce dialogically industrialist ideology.
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Abraham, Adam. "Spurious Victorians : imitation and the nineteenth-century novel." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cbf24b85-cc63-42be-ba84-2f065942c4d8.
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In 'A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism', Jerome J. McGann writes, '[A]n author's work possesses autonomy only when it remains an unheard melody'. For the published and successful writer in the nineteenth century, such autonomy was often unattainable. Publications such as The Pickwick Papers inspired an array of opportunistic successors, including stage plays, unauthorized sequels, jest books, song books, and shilling and penny imitations. Despite the proliferation, this strain of writing is rarely studied. This thesis recovers ephemeral, scurrilous texts, often anonymous or pseudonymous, and reads them in the context of their canonical sources. Retrieving bibliographical environments, it demonstrates how plagiaristic, parodic, and willfully unoriginal works impacted on the careers of three novelists: Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and George Eliot. The thesis argues that formal distinctions among modes of Victorian writing - criticism, parody, and plagiarism - often blur. Further, it argues that our understanding of a particular novelist's work must be broadened to include sequels, spinoffs, and imitations: to know a particular author means to know the spurious and oftentimes bad (morally or aesthetically) works that the author inspired. The Spurious Victorians of the title form something of countercanon to the 'major' writers of the period. Thomas Peckett Prest, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, and Joseph Liggins, among many others, informed and influenced the literary history that has in turn denied them admission. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote, 'If only men of genius were to write, Lord help us! how many books would there be?' Of course, Victorian print culture found room for the genius and the subgenius, Boz as well as Bos. 'Spurious Victorians' recovers works that have been lost from view in order to better understand the process by which an individual authorial voice emerged amid an echo chamber of competing, imitative voices.
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Kelly, Rita Olivia. "Constructed meanings and contesting voices : the Opium War in archival, historical and fictional Anglophone narratives." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/206694.
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This thesis explores the ways in which the Opium War has been represented in both non-fictional and fictional Anglophone narratives. It looks at the construction of various 19th century discourses surrounding this historical event and the different meanings it has been endowed with through such discourses. It then examines the ways in which some of those meanings have been challenged in more recent accounts. The purpose of this thesis is to show how and why certain ideas are constructed and propagated, and how these in turn can be questioned, challenged and reinterpreted, giving us a wider perspective, and thus better understanding, of the said event.
The study is divided into two parts: non-fiction and fiction. The non-fiction section includes two chapters on the discourses of the Opium War, one on translation and one on historical texts while the second section focuses on two contemporary fictional narratives of the Opium War. Chapters one and two are based on a selection of 19th century archival documents and constitute a discussion of the discourses that have been formed around the Opium War in five specific fields: political, economic, religious, medical and legal. An analysis of these discourses will show them to be part of a larger sinophobic discourse that constructed China as Britain’s cultural inferior around the time of the conflict.
To view the Opium War in terms of cultural encounter requires a discussion of translation. Chapter three investigates the role and importance of translation and translators in creating and/ or sustaining the meanings created by these various discourses. Chapter four is an analysis of two more recent historical narratives: one a history of opium, the other a history of the Opium War. These texts contribute to an expanded understanding of the 19th century conflict as they offer different and more contemporary meanings with regard to the war that partly challenge earlier ones. Because of that, they also mark a transition towards my discussion of fictional narratives where the focus is on introducing new speaking positions that contest those ideas, images and ‘truths’ propagated by narratives such as those that are part of the Opium War discourses.
Chapter five investigates how Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession goes against an important aspect of such discourses, that of hierarchy, by emphasizing cultural incommensurability and cross-cultural miscommunication between the British and the Chinese while refusing to stratify the two into cultural and civilizational hierarchies. Chapter six examines the ways in which Amitav Ghosh invents a new narrative of the Opium War in the first two parts of an intended trilogy: Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke. This last chapter looks at how, by focusing on the silenced Indian aspect of the Opium War and the unexplored Sino-Indian side of the conflict, Ghosh transforms the war from an exclusively Sino-British to a more global event.published_or_final_version
English
Doctoral
Doctor of Philosophy
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Pasholok, Maria. "Imaginary interiors : representing domestic spaces in 1910s and 1920s Russian film and literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c9d47ca1-6164-48fb-99f1-67ef37c77c4a.
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This thesis is an exploration of the ways in which a number of important Russian writers and filmmakers of the 1910s and 1920s appropriated domestic interiors as structural, visual and literary metaphors. My focus is on the artistic articulation of the closed space of the Russian domestic interior, in particular as it surfaced in the narratives of the modernist literature and cinema of the time and became an essential metaphor of its age. In my discussion I take issue with two standard ways of understanding domestic space in existing literature. I argue that representations of home spaces in early twentiethcentury Russian culture mount a challenge to the conventional view of the home as a place of safety and stability. I also argue that, at this point, the traditional approach to the room and the domestic space as a fixed closed structure is assailed by representations that see domestic space as kinetic. The importance of the 'room in motion' means that I address cinematic as well as literary representations of domestic space, and show that even literary representation borrow cinematic techniques. My different chapters constitute case studies of various separate, but complementary, aspects of the representation of home space. The first chapter shows how domestic space in reflected in the poetical language of Anna Akhmatova. The second chapter focuses on the parallel exploration of rooms and a child's consciousness in Kotik Letaev by Andrei Belyi. The third chapter discovers the philosophy of a room built by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii in his short stories of the 1920s. The next three chapters focus on interiors of three different cinematic genres. The fourth chapter looks closely at films created by Evgenii Bauer, showing the director's innovative techniques of framing and set-design. The fifth chapter explores the film Tret'ia Meshchanskaia by Abram Room, focusing on the director's employment of the room as a structural device of the film. The last chapter analyses two lyrical comedies by Boris Barnet to show the comic effect produced by the empty room and domestic objects in his films, and also focuses on the image of staircase. In conclusion, I speculate that the representation of interior spaces in the period in question goes beyond genre, medium, and narrative structure and becomes an important and culturally dynamic motif of the time.
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Downing, Lisa Michelle. "Desire and immobility : situating necrophilia in nineteenth-century French literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1999. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ccbb5b9e-58da-4d36-901b-bd71112f3c05.
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Cotter, Robert Edmund. "Aspects of philistinism in nineteenth-century German literature : Eichendorff, Keller, Fontane." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1991. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:fa741b6d-6e13-4587-9369-2a477651cb24.
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The thesis aims to explore philistinism as a German literary topos, in the nineteenth century. It begins with an examination of the extra-literary metaphorical usage of key words like Philister and proceeds to a summary of its impact on writers in the period. By so doing, I have tried to present an image of the developing tradition of the literary depiction of philistines. The main part of the thesis is devoted to three writers - Richendorff, Keller, Fontane - whose work presents us with contrasting responses to the problem of philistinism. Unlike previous investigations, my approach is not only through explicit linguistic and visual markers, but also implicit depictions of philistines in the work of the three writers. To achieve this, attention is focussed on tone and literary devices, comic mode, irony, metaphor. I aim thereby to show the function of philistinism in these writings, an analysis not previously attempted. Eichendorff's work is shown to be imbued with a fundamental antithesis between the lives of Dichter and Philister, so comprehensive as to include eschatological implications. In Keller we notice a questioning of such a dichotomy, an unwillingness to acquiesce in its distinctions and an emphasis on society in determining the worth of his characters. Fontane's work represents the most radical reassessment of the Romantic position and displays a clear shift from categorical thinking to a pervasive ambivalence. Whilst philistinism is an issue for all three writers, the differences in their approach and consequent portrayals are revealing: my Epilogue suggests that their different modes of presentation reflect changes of ethos from Romanticism to realism, which in turn reflect changes in social values over the course of the nineteenth century. The interest of the present thesis is its demonstration that such changes can, in German literary culture, be so precisely observed in the changing treatment of the topos of philistinism.
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Pinson, Guillaume 1973. "Fiction du monde : analyse littéraire et médiatique de la mondanité, 1885-1914." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=102151.
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This work proposes a double analysis of the mundane society representations between 1885 and 1914, in the press and the novel. This analysis separates these two categories of media to insist on their particularities, and tries to think of them in terms of an interaction.A first part explores the organisation of the topics and the main genre of the mundane society in the press, applying the social discourse theory. The analysis is based on the perusal of a set of representative daily newspapers (Le Gaulois, Le Figaro) and of weekly and monthly publications (Le Grand monde, La Vie parisienne, Femina notably, as well as around thirty other titles). It shows that the mundane society in the newspaper is constrained by a poetics stemming from the characteristics of press writing: collective writing, periodicity of the publication, text length limitation and reference to reality. Some texts are tempted by fiction, even though they keep a reality-based referential, whereas other texts that are openly fictitious, fit the mundane fiction into the newspaper.
The second part is based on the general conclusion of the first part: the mundane society in the newspaper is a represented society, made of for a distant and anonymous public. With the advent of the medias in the 19th century, the mundane society has entered into the era of mediations and "industrial writing". Some writers, from Bourget to Proust, take these upheavals into account and present the mundane society as a metaphor of the mass media society. This is done following three main axes: the temptation of withdrawal of the fiction into a closed world (psychological and mundane movement impulsed by Goncourt with Cherie, prolonged by Bourget and Hervieux notably); the games of exchange between the novel and the newspaper (Maupassant, Toulet, Legrand, amongst others); and finally, the isolation of the mundane world and the aesthetic work on mediations (Rolland, Colette, Mirbeau, Lorrain et Gide notably). All these writings address the question of sociability at the era of the triumph of mediations: what room is left for the mundane society, for direct encounter, for exchange, in a world of mediation and mass media coverage? for immediate connections in a society of mediated ties? The epilogue proposes a journalistic reading of A la recherche du temps perdu, synthesis-work which inaugurates a modern and sociological perception: it is in the world of the imagined mundane society, distant and represented in the mass media, that the narrator draws the resources for his observation of the world.
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Shannon, Josephine E. "From discourse to the couch : the obscured self in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary narrative." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=34533.
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Although the letter purports to represent fact, it cannot avoid having a partly or potentially fictive status, turning as it does on the complex interplay between the real and the imagined. Consequently, the main critical approach of this paper is to consider the interactions between conflicting modes of expression in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary fiction. The rhetorical and conceptual contrarieties that I examine are broadly characterized by the contradiction between the implied spontaneity of the familiar letter and the inevitable artifice of its form. Working with familiar letters by four writers between the years 1740 and 1825, I specifically address various narrative patterns by which each turns to the act of communication to draw upon the experience of an isolated self. Against a background which explores the main developments in epistolary fiction and a historical progression of the uses and significance of letter-writing, I investigate epistolary texts by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Byron, John Keats, and William Hazlitt. In turning to letters by each author, I explore the literary, theoretical and especially the psychological implications of the tenuous divisions between fact and fiction. In particular, my analysis stresses that letter-writing is an authorial act in which writing about the self can be understood as a literary form of self-portraiture or creative expression.I examine this claim---and the metaphors defining it---in two ways. First, by focusing on selected letters, I foreground each writer's language as an agent of internal conflict. In so doing, I am able to formulate distinctive questions regarding the potential of epistolary narratives to transform emotional or psychological schisms into fictions which become explicitly creative texts. Secondly, I analyze the changing nature of the fictions which emerge through this process. My findings conclude that authors' letters must be read, at least very often, as a constituent part of their literary work and as interpretive models of a shifting dynamic of psychological expression.
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Bending, Lucy. "The representation of bodily pain in late nineteenth-century English culture." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1997. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:751a567b-8260-4dfc-8e9e-904b7e1da20f.
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This dissertation presents a study of the ways in which concepts of pain were treated across a broad range of late Victorian writing, placing literary texts alongside sermons, medical textbooks and campaigning leaflets, in order to suggest a pattern of representation and evasion to be perceived throughout the different texts assembled. In the first two chapters I establish the cultural and historical background to physical suffering in the late nineteenth century, as the Christian paradigm for suffering (the subject of the first chapter) lost its pre-eminance to that of medicine (Chapter Two). The next two chapters are concerned with the problem of the expressibility of pain. In Chapter Three I argue that despite popular belief, voiced most clearly by Virginia Woolf, that 'there is no language for pain', sufferers find language that is both metaphorical and directly referential to express their bodily suffering. Chapter Four takes up the cultural restrictions placed on the expression of pain, using the acrimonious debate over vivisection that arose at the end of the century. Bringing together the prolific texts of both vivisectionists and antivivisectionists, I display the possibilities and limitations of particular literary forms, arguing, for example, that language appropriate to medical textbooks proved to be too shocking in books with a wider circulation. The final chapter is concerned with the ways in which pain was schematised in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. I explore the basis of belief in pain as a shared, cross-cultural phenomenon and make the case, using the examples of invertebrate neurology, fire-walking and tattooing, that the understanding of pain is sharply affected by class, gender, race and supposed degree of criminality, despite the fact that pain is often invoked as a marker of shared human identity.
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Geissler, Christopher Michael. "'Die schwarze Ware' : transatlantic slavery and abolitionism in German writing, 1789-1871." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610465.
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Dredge, Sarah. "Accommodating feminism : Victorian fiction and the nineteenth-century women's movement." Thesis, McGill University, 2000. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36917.
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The research field of this thesis is framed by the major political and legal women's movement campaigns from the 1840s to the 1870s: the debates over the Married Women's Property Act; over philanthropy and methods of addressing social ills; the campaign for professional opportunities for women, and the arguments surrounding women's suffrage. I address how these issues are considered and contextualised in major works of Victorian fiction: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871--2).In works of fiction by women, concepts of social justice were not constrained by layers of legal abstraction and the obligatory political vocabulary of "disinterest." Contemporary fiction by women could thus offer some of the most developed articulations of women's changing expectations. This thesis demonstrates that the Victorian novel provides a distinct synthesis of, and contribution to, arguments grouped under the rubric of the "woman question." The novel offers a perspective on feminist politics in which conflicting social interests and demands can be played out, where ethical questions meet everyday life, and human relations have philosophical weight. Given women's traditional exclusion from the domain of legitimate (authoritative) speech, the novels of Gaskell, the Bronte's, and Eliot, traditionally admired for their portrayal of moral character, play a special role in giving voice to the key political issues of women's rights, entitlements, and interests. Evidence for the political content and efficacy of these novels is drawn from archival sources which have been little used in literary studies (including unpublished materials), as well as contemporary periodicals. Central among these is the English Woman's Journal. Conceived as the mouthpiece of the early women's movement, the journal offers a valuable record of the feminist activity of the period. Though it has not been widely exploited, particularly in literary studies, detailed study of the journal reveals close parallels between the ideological commitments and concerns of the women's movement and novels by mid-Victorian women.
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Ranum, Benedikte Torkelsdatter. "Typecast Victorians : uses of biblical typology in late nineteenth-century literature." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/2007.
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This thesis examines the literary uses of biblical typology in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. It aims to show how late Victorian writers, having opted out of the orthodox Christian beliefs of the age, were still writing from within a cultural discourse shaped by, and based upon, such faith. Covering works as diverse as Sartor Resartus, De Profundis, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, and discussing writers who range from Mary Augusta Ward via Hardy to Strindberg and Dostoevsky, my contention is that these writers not only used the structure, terminology, and imagery of biblical typology to express their religious doubts, but that they 'reclaimed' what was strictly seen as a mode of exegesis and transformed it into a richly suggestive signifying system. Through this reconstructed mode of expression, they could offer to their readers ideas of a new 'religion' or, at least, a possible way out of the despair caused by the ultimate failure of Christian faith. The thesis is presented in three parts, the first of which briefly details the various available definitions of biblical typology itself. Following this, each sub-section of Part One traces a different aspect of late Victorian typology usage. Parts Two and Three deal with what I claim to be the two major strains of the late nineteenth century's secular use of typology - those concerned, respectively, with the 'imitation of' or 'association with' biblical types in their relation to literary characters. The changes made to the traditional biblical typology by late Victorian writers, as examined in this thesis, brought the biblical anti-type closer to the Jungian archetype, just as it brought the Nineteenth Century closer to our twentieth-century view of our religious and textual inheritance.
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Tse, Chun-yip, and 謝雋曄. "Publications for children in late Qing China." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2013. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B50434408.
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Traditional publications for Chinese children were based on core value and belief systems in Confucianism. After the First Opium War, foreign missionaries began to disseminate Western knowledge and religious beliefs within the Chinese society on a wider scale, reaching children through the avenue of education. At this time, however, most Chinese intellectuals held fast to their belief in traditional Chinese methods of education which emphasised the Confucian principles.
The loss of the Sino-Japanese War brought a realization within China that its society and education system were relatively backward when compared with those of Western powers. Chinese intellectuals became more aware of the necessity for an entire education reform which should start from the younger generations in an attempt to revitalize China. As a result of this realization, Chinese educators began to adopt the missionaries’ practice of using publications targeted specifically at children. From the mid-19th century onwards, these publications underwent a period of vigorous development in China.
Missionaries and Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing period had thus, between them, helped to prepare the ground for the modernization of China by educating the future generations to employ new ideas and values.
This historical survey aims to investigate the development of Chinese publications for children from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, and offering a closer look at childhood education in China during this period. Some basic clarifications on the definition of children and the nature of books for children is given in the Introductory Chapter, and a brief account of the previous works and articles related to the study is also included. The main part of this thesis starts with a critical examination of the changes of the traditional Chinese primers for children education like Three Character Classic (《三字經》) under the influence of western ideas. Then it proceeds to an exploration of the emergence of modernized textbooks in Chapter Three with a critical appraisal of noted writers and publishers such as Wang Hengtong (Wang Hang-T’ong 王亨統) and the Commercial Press (商務印書館). Chapters Four to Seven present case studies of four children’s periodicals representing different parties of interest in the reform of children education, they are respectively the missionary publication The Child’s Paper (Xiaohai yuebao 《小孩月報》), The Children’s Educator (Mengxue bao《蒙學報》) published by the Chinese reformist, Enlightenment Pictorial (Qimeng huabao《啟蒙畫報》) published by enlightened Chinese intellectuals, and The Children’s World (Tongzi shijie 《童子世界》) published by the Chinese revolutionist. Chapter Eight attempts to reveal the nature of leisure readings and the development of children’s literature in late Qing China while the final Chapter provides conclusions and suggestions for further investigation.
By writing this thesis, I am committed to provide readers with a comprehensive and solid historical sketch of the development of children’s publication in a critical period of pre-modern China.published_or_final_version
Chinese
Doctoral
Doctor of Philosophy
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Prager, Valerie. "Comparative analysis of the Christian theme in Soviet literature." Thesis, McGill University, 1993. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=67518.
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During the 70 years of the Soviet regime the officially approved Soviet literature consistently reflected an exclusively materialistic world view. As a result, there were very few critical works, published in the West, dealing with the Christian theme in Russian literature of the Soviet period.Surprisingly, literature with the Christian theme did exist in the years of militant state atheism. Such literary works raised questions about the purpose of life, about truth, moral courage and the person of Christ. These books were published during the 60-s, the time of the "thaw", and became a focal point of public discussions. Two of them--Bulgakov's "Master i Margarita" and Pasternak's "Doktor Zhivago" were internationally acknowledged as major literary works.
This study will examine in detail and compare five literary works with christian content, published in the Soviet years of Russia. Two of them were mentioned above. The other three are "Plakha" by Aytmatov, "Dzhvari" by Alfeeva and "Fakul'tet nenizhnikh veshchei" by Dombrovsky.
The existence of such literature proves that all the efforts to suppress the human spirit and its longing for the Absolute have failed.
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Stanek, Mark C. "Guitar in the opera literature : a study of the instrument's use in opera during the 19th and 20th centuries." Virtual Press, 2004. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1285408.
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This dissertation is a study of the use of guitar in opera. Ten operas were chosen from the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century as a representative cross section of operas that use the guitar. The operas studied are: The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini, Oberon by Carl Maria von Weber, Don Pasquale by Gaetano Donizetti, Beatrice and Benedict by Hector Berlioz, Otello and Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi, La vida breve by Manuel de Falla, The Nightingale by Igor Stravinsky, Wozzeck by Alban Berg, and Paul Bunyan by Benjamin Britten. The study examines the technical aspects of each guitar part and how the guitar relates to the libretto and to the other instruments of the orchestra.The study finds that, with some exceptions, the guitar parts are idiomatic and not difficult to execute. There is some need on the part of the guitarist to edit the parts for technical and historical reasons and editorial suggestions are made by the author. The guitar is often related to the libretto and often appears onstage, yet it is almost always used as a prop and the performing guitarist is placed offstage or in the orchestra pit. There are significant problems found concerning the guitar's lack of volume. Composers tend to limit the number of instruments in use with the guitar. They do not, however, tend to give the guitar louder dynamics when other instruments are used at the same time. The guitar is generally used in outdoor scenes, to evoke a folk idiom, or when specifically referred to in the libretto. The use of the guitar is found to be mostly limited to simple accompaniments which do not utilize the full resources of the instrument.School of Music
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Mathews, Peter David 1975. "Strategies of realism : realist fiction and postmodern theory." Monash University, Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, 2001. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8656.
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Maxwell, Catherine. "Looking and perception in nineteenth century poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8f4ff9be-6c07-4060-b777-6a7402d024c7.
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The thesis examines a series of nineteenth century poets whose poems are concerned with complex relations of looking and perception, and concentrates on Shelley and the poets he influenced: Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hardy. It focusses on poems dealing with the visual arts and aesthetic modes of perception, and concludes with a study of Walter Pater - an unrecognised follower of Shelley - and his notions of artistic character. An emphasis on the way face and bodily form are scrutinised, in poems concerning painting, sculpture and portraiture, leads to the hypothesis that the way the poet pictures essence or character through corporeal form is correlative to the essence or character of his own poetry. The particular spatial relations and visual representations of the poetry provide an index to specific patterns of reading. At the heart of this examination is a Shelleyan conception of the "unsculptured image", the characterising force and pre-given perspective of a poet's poem, which has a primary shaping effect on his language and representations, and continues to exert itself in the poem's reading. As this "image" is an imaginative rather than purely linguistic force, the analyses of selected poems avoid reduction to considerations of language and rhetoric alone, seeking rather to engage with the question of what constitutes a writer's own essence or particularity and what gives a strong poem its compulsive power. The thesis draws on the work of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot to inform its ideas of poetic space and depth, and to produce an understanding of the poetic text very different from that given by a classical reading; and so alter the way one perceives the poem as literary object. In addition to this, certain nineteenth century and earlier aesthetic writings, and the prose works of the poets themselves, establish the critical basis of the arguments advanced. The thesis also endeavours to follow through the arguments of traditional scholarship in order to provide critique on distinctions or departures made. Chapter I examines Shelley's 'On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery'; Chapter II deals with portraiture in Browning's 'My Last Duchess' and Rossetti's The Portrait'; Chapter III turns to the sculpture of the hermaphrodite in Swinburne's early lyric 'Hermaphroditus'; Chapter IV looks at Thomas Hardy's poems about sketches and shades; Chapter V is an epilogue in which the work of Walter Pater draws together the ideas developed in the rest of the thesis.
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Prince, John S. "Utopia Victoriana : the utopian novel in late Victorian Britain, 1871-1905." Virtual Press, 2003. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1259302.
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This study focuses on three significant issues addressed by utopian literature of the late Victorian period: the class struggle and the resulting debate about capitalism and socialism, the nature and significance of language, and the influence of Darwin's theory of evolution on attitudes toward human existence. The utopian reaction to each of these three issues reflects the increasingly scientific investigation and analysis of specialized fields of knowledge that developed throughout the nineteenth century. Within the context of major scientific advancements in biology, geology, linguistics, and technology, utopian literature of the late-Victorian period, c. 1871-1905, responds primarily to two opposing nineteenth-century attitudes, the complacent optimism of laissez-faire individualism and the resigned pessimism of naturalistic determinism. Literary utopianism of the late nineteenth century is an attempt to resolve the philosophical and epistemological conflict between the impersonal and seemingly unalterable natural laws of science and the indomitable human will. I contend that the utopian novel re-emerges in the last third of the nineteenth century at the intersection of scientific discourse and literary discourse. I further argue that the late Victorian utopia marks a critical transition between the classic utopia the modern utopia.Department of English
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Kinney, Tracey Jane. "Challenging the myth of Young Germany, conflict and consensus in the works of Karl Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube, Theodor Mundt and Ludolf Wienbarg." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq25079.pdf.
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Campeau, Sylvain 1960. "Poésie et discours poétique au Canada français (1889-1909)." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36560.
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In 1892, in one of his characteristic attacks, Arthur Buies denounced the "deplorable" style of certain young French-Canadian writers of the day. The "jeunes barbares", as he called them, published in small magazines such as Le Recueil litteraire and L'Echo des jeunes, and were strongly influenced by French fin-de-siecle writing (the decadent and Symbolist schools in particular). The creation of the Ecole litteraire de Montreal in 1895 can be seen as a continuation of these varied literary endeavours. Quite aware of the criticisms leveled at young writers by Buies and others, the members of the Ecole viewed their association as both a literary circle and a training ground. The Bulletin du parler francais au Canada , founded in 1902, approached the issue of the poor quality of spoken and written French in French Canada from a more philological angle. It was in the Bulletin... that Camille Roy published his articles on French-Canadian literary history and his famous conference on the nationalisation of French-Canadian literature (in 1904--1905). This text was to have an influence so far-reaching that the Ecole litteraire de Montreal, in its second incarnation, espoused---albeit with some reticence---certain of the "pre-regionalist" values it promoted. The texts published in the Ecole's magazine, Le Terroir (1909), clearly indicate this.This thesis analyses the diverse modernist and pre-regionalist discourses present from 1889 to 1909, taking into particular account the variations in their antagonism (which manifested itself in a number of short-lived quarrels), with a view to providing a more complete and nuanced picture of the period than previous studies have done; it explores, in the process, the less well-known antecedents to the period which was to follow, a period during which the opposition between the regionalists and the "exotiques" came to a head.
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Dudley, Shawna L., and University of Lethbridge Faculty of Arts and Science. "A chameleon role : how adoption functions in nineteenth-century British fiction." Thesis, Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Science, 2001, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/130.
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In my thesis I look at adopted characters in nine nineteenth-century works: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's Aurora Leigh, George Eliot's Silas Marner, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and both Bleak House and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. From these works we see that the figure of the adopted child both destabilizes and expands the Victorian concept of the family, a concept which the literature of the time was often concerned to reinforce. Since adoption implies the injection of a foreign element into the fabric of family life, it serves to underline the fragility of blood-ties. In this sense, the adopted child functions as a figure of subversion and instability within the heart of the family. But because adoption also implies a looser acceptance of what family means, it may serve to expand the definition of kinship. The tension between these two ideas is dealt with in my thesis. No two novels treat adoption in the same way and the possibilities for adoptive relationships are endless, with potential for good and bad relationships, allegory and realism, expansion and deconstruction of the family.150 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.
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Jenkins, Jennifer Lei. "Failed mothers and fallen houses: Gothic domesticity in nineteenth-century American fiction." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186122.
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This study examines the relation between gender and genre in four novels that chart the development of American domestic life from the Colonial to the Gilded Age. In these novels, the presence in the house of women--mothers, daughters, sisters, servants, slaves--often threatens the fathers' dynastic ambitions and subverts the formal intentions of the narrative. These women represent familiar but strange forces of the uncanny which lurk beneath the apparently placid surface of domestic narrative. In "house" novels by Hawthorne, Stowe, Alcott, and James, interactions of the uncanny feminine with dynastic concerns threaten not only the novel's social message of destiny and dynasty, but the traditional form of the novel itself. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne constructs a narrative in which patrician fathers and domestic daughters struggle for control of the House and its story. Slavery disrupts domestic life in Uncle Tom's Cabin, inverting and thereby perverting traditional notions of home and family and producing monstrous mothers and failed households. Alcott details the abuses and dangers of reified gender roles in family life, while depicting a young woman's attempt to reconstruct domesticity as a female community in Work. Finally, James displaces domestic concerns entirely from The Other House, portraying instead the violent nature of feminine desire unrestrained by tradition, community, or family. Story and telling work at cross-purposes in these novels, creating a tension between Romantic structures and realistic narrative strategies. These authors depart from the tropes of their times, using gothic devices to reveal monstrous mothers, uncanny children, and failed or fallen houses within the apparently conservative domestic novel. Such gothic devices transcend literary historians' distinctions of romance and sentimental fiction as respectively male and female stories and reveal the fundamentally subversive nature of domestic fiction. For these writers, the uncanny presence of the feminine produces a counternarrative of gender, class, and race, redefines the cultural boundaries of home and family, and exposes the fictive nature of social constructions of gender and domesticity.
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Barnhill, Gretchen Huey, and University of Lethbridge Faculty of Arts and Science. "Fallen angels : female wrongdoing in Victorian novels." Thesis, Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Science, 2005, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/241.
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In the Victorian novel, gender-based social norms dictated appropriate behaviour. Female wrongdoing was not only judged according to the law, but also according to the idealized conception of womanhood. It was this implicit cultural measure, and how far the woman contravened the feminine norms of society, that defined her criminal act rather than the act itself or the injury her act inflicted. When a woman deviated from the Victorian construction of the ideal woman, she was stigmatized and labelled. The fallen woman was viewed as a moral menance, a contagion. Foreign women who committed crimes were judged for their 'lack of Englishness.' Insanity evolved into not only a medical explanation for bizarre behaviour, but also a legal explanation for criminal behaviour. Finally, the habitual woman criminal and the infanticidal mother were seen as unnatural. Regardless of the crime committed, female criminals were ostracized and removed from 'respectable' English society.vii, 163 leaves ; 29 cm.
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Gairn, Louisa. "Aspects of modern Scottish literature and ecological thought." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14839.
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'Aspects of Modern Scottish Literature and Ecological Thought' argues that the science and philosophy of 'ecology' has had a profound impact on Scottish literature since the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, and relates the work of successive generations of Scottish writers to concurrent developments in ecological thought and the environmental sciences. Chapter One suggests that, while Romantic ways of thinking about the natural world remained influential in nineteenth-century culture, new environmental theories provided fresh ways of perceiving the world, evident from the writings of Scottish mountaineers. Chapter Two explores the confrontation of modernity and wilderness in the fiction and travel writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, and some contemporaries such as John Muir. Chapter Three suggests that ecologically-sensitive local and global concerns, rather than 'national' ones per se, are central to the work of Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and others, while Chapter Four demonstrates that post-war 'rural' writers including Nan Shepherd, Neil Gunn, Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown, often viewed as peripheral, are actually central and of international relevance, and challenges the assumption that there is a fundamental divide between Scottish rural and urban writing. Finally, Chapter Five argues that contemporary writers John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Alan Warner are not only reviewing human relationships with nature, but also the role writing has to play in exploring and strengthening that relationship, helping to determine the ecological 'value' of poetry and fiction. By looking at Scottish literature through the lens of ecological thought, and engaging with international discourses of 'Ecocriticism', this thesis provides a fresh perspective in contrast to the dominant critical views of modern Scottish literature, and demonstrates that Scottish writing constitutes a heritage of ecological thought which, in this age of environmental awareness, should be recognised as not only relevant, but vital.
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Kisawadkorn, Kriengsak. "American Grotesque from Nineteenth Century to Modernism: the Latter's Acceptance of the Exceptional." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278030/.
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This dissertation explores a history of the grotesque and its meaning in art and literature along with those of its related term, the arabesque, since their co-existence, specifically in literature, is later treated by a well-known nineteenth-century American writer in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque- Theories or views of the grotesque (used in literature), both in Europe and America, belong to twelve theorists of different eras, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present period, especially Modernism (approximately from 1910 to 1945)--Rabelais, Hegel, Scott, Wright, Hugo, Symonds, Ruskin, Santayana, Kayser, Bakhtin, (William Van) O'Connor, and Spiegel. My study examines the grotesque in American literature, as treated by both nineteenth-century writers--Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and, significantly, by modernist writers--Anderson, West, and Steinbeck in Northern (or non-Southern) literature; Faulkner, McCullers, and (Flannery) O'Connor in Southern literature. I survey several novels and short stories of these American writers for their grotesqueries in characterization and episodes. The grotesque, as treated by these earlier American writers is often despised, feared, or mistrusted by other characters, but is the opposite in modernist fiction.
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Glaser, Catherine. "Clinique et roman de la folie, 1860-1910." Thesis, McGill University, 1985. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=72763.
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Sturgeon, Sinéad. "Law & literature in the writings of Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, and James Clarence Mangan." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.711601.
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White, Claire. "Work and leisure in late nineteenth-century French literature and visual culture." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610774.
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Pakhomova, Natalia. "Marginal voices : Sergei Dovlatov and his characters in the context of the Leningrad literature of the 1960s and 70s." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38255.
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In spite of the growing interest of Russian and Western scholars in Sergei Dovlatov and his art, his place in Russian literature has not yet been clearly defined. His position as a writer in Russia in the 1960s and early 70s was ambiguous due to his opposition to the traditional Soviet canon and rejection by the current literary establishment. However, he later gained recognition and popularity as an emigre writer in the United States. The concept of 'marginality' colours his biography and art, for his life itself was a succession of marginal experiences and marginality is the key topic of his writings.Marginality unifies Dovlatov's art. This is evident in his marginal status as a writer in and outside the Soviet Union, and in his writing which uses the underappreciated short form of narration (the novella and short story), develops a non-traditional conversational style, pursues the themes of non-conventional behaviour and introduces eccentric characters.
However, it is not possible to discuss Dovlatov's status as a marginal writer without contextualizing his life and art in the ambience of the entire generation of Leningrad writers of the sixties. Writers and poets such as Brodskii, Goliavkin, Gubin, Vakhtin and Ufliand do not only represent the culture of Leningrad's artistic non-conformists, they are also Dovlatov's prototypes and protagonists. Apart from their marginal status, all these writers shared the determination to make independent choices in life and in art. They refused to be viewed as marginal authors by the dominant canon, which disregarded their works as insignificant. Here as well marginality emerges as a literary concept and a behavioural model, shaped by societal norms (the positive type of citizen or official Soviet writer) and traditional canons (the Russian didactic tradition or Soviet ideological writing). This literary concept includes an orientation towards American literature, the creation of marginal characters and themes as well as an exploration of different styles.
The works of writers of the Leningrad circle laid the foundation for the emergence of a literary phenomenon such as Dovlatov. It is in delineating this context that this dissertation demonstrates Dovlatov's original approach to marginality, as well as the way he turned his life experience into literature and became a spokesman for neglected fellow writers and citizens.
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Cattell, Victoria Fayrer. "Irony and alazony in the English Künstlerroman." Thesis, McGill University, 1986. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=65961.
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Wolfe, Andrea P. "Black mothers and the nation : claiming space and crafting signification for the black maternal body in American women's narratives of slavery, reconstruction, and segregation, 1852-2001." CardinalScholar 1.0, 2010. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1560845.
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“Black Mothers and the Nation” tracks the ways that texts produced by United States women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries position the black maternal body as subversive to the white patriarchal power structure for which it labored and that has acted in many ways to abject it from the national body. This study points to the ways in which the black mother’s subversive potential has been repeatedly, violently, and surreptitiously circumscribed in some quarters even as it succeeds in others. Several important thematic threads run throughout the chapters of this study, sometimes appearing in clear relationship to the texts discussed and sometimes underwriting their analysis in less obvious ways: the functioning of the black maternal body to both support the construction of and undermine white womanhood in slavery and in the years beyond; the reclamation of the maternal body as a site of subversion and nurturance as well as erotic empowerment; the resistance of black mother figures to oppressive discourses surrounding their bodies and reproduction; and, finally, the figurative and literal location of the black mother in a national body politic that has simultaneously used and abjected it over the course of centuries. Using these lenses, this study focuses on a grouping of women’s literature that depicts slavery and its legacy for black women and their bodies. The narratives discussed in this study explore the intersections of the issues outlined above in order to get at meaningful expressions of black maternal identity. By their very nature as representations of historical record and regional and national realities, these texts speak to the problematic placement of black maternal bodies within the nation, beginning in the antebellum era and continuing through the present; in other words, these slavery, Reconstruction, and segregation narratives connect personal and physical experiences of maternity to the national body.The subordination of embodied power : sentimental representations of the black maternal body in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the life of a slave girl -- Recuperating the body : the black mother's reclamation of embodied presence and her reintegration into the black community in Pauline Hopkins's Contending forces and Toni Morrison's Beloved -- The narrative power of the black maternal body : resisting and exceeding visual economies of discipline in Margaret Walker's Jubilee and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose -- Mapping black motherhood onto the nation : the black maternal body and the body politic in Lillian Smith's Strange fruit and Alice Randall's The wind done gone -- Michelle Obama in context.
Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only
Department of English
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England, Peter S. (Peter Shands). "American Literary Pragmatism : Lighting Out for the Territory." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1998. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278511/.
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Emig, Rainer. "The end of modernism in English poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c02149d4-6f3b-4368-b20e-d8e669514ccf.
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'End' as 'goal' and 'limit' is explored in signs, symbols, metaphors, metonymies, and myths in the works of G.M. Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, before the study examines the aesthetics of modernist poetry which - through psychoanalysis, economy, and language philosophy - presents itself as one facet of the 'modernist project'. Modernist poetry struggles with its material, the lacking motivation of signs, the unstable connection of signifier and signified. Already in Hopkins this creates tensions between mimetic endeavour and construction. Appropriation and distancing as compensation strategies prefigure modernism's tendencies of simultaneous expansion and reduction. They produce impasses, evident in attempts to signify the self: absence, dissolution, and submission to myth, recurring limits in modernist poetry. Yeats's poems avoid mimetic tensions by focussing on opaque signifieds of symbols, intertextuality rather than empiricism. Yet the excluded 'outside' in the shape of history questions works and their creator. Again, silence, dissolution, or superhistoricism become refuges, leading to dissolution of symbols into metaphors and metonymies or their sublimation in myth. Eliot's poems seemingly return to realism. Yet their focussing on everyday life disguises the internalisation of reality in psychological landscapes. Difficulties of drawing borderlines between subject and object(s) result: objects become threatening and characters mutilated in reifications, processes expressed in shifts from metaphor to metonymy. Pound's stabilising strategies reify language itself. His personae try to legitimise poems by incorporating histories of others, but produce overcharge and disintegration. Imagism refines modernism's reductive move, but creates monadic closure. Attempts at impersonality and superhistoricism lead to the dominance of the suppressed. Vorticism's construction/destruction dialectic does not tolerate 'works'. Only the ideogrammatic method achieves the shift to signifiers only which enables poems to 'include' reality and history at the cost of blindness towards themselves. Psychoanalysis displays analogies in its holistic concepts and simultaneous internal delineations, its distrust of signs and incomplete and lacking constructs deriving from them. Modernist poetry's struggle with tradition in order to legitimise its existence mirrors the individual's subjection to the 'law of the father'. Individuation is achieved by mutilation; the return to imaginary wholeness preceding it, although Utopian goal, remains impossible; it appears in poems as self-destruction. The economy of modernist poems shows their fight against expenditure, creation of artificial value through symbols, eventually a reductio ad absurdum in poems producing only themselves in reification. Work and subject become borderlines when reality shifts into the text altogether and the signified is eliminated. Language philosophy reproduces the positions of modernist poems towards reality, admitting the separation of language and objects: Nietzsche in disqualifying truth, Wittgenstein uncovering language's impotence. Again the excluded appears as the mystical which Heidegger re-integrates by setting up language as reality's creator and receptacle of Being. The nominalist upside-down turn of his linguistic universe is analogous to modernism's myth of itself. Adorno criticises the closed nature of works as statements and advocates a 'true' modernism in the fragmentation of the work and openness towards heterogeneity. Like Baudrillard, he stresses the riddle of art which permits its orbital position, neither detached from societal conditioning nor completely subjected to it, thus capable of unveiling the relativity of master-narratives. The 'true' modernist poem displays its tensions and 'sacrifices itself in order to remind its reader of the damages of existence.
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Nadler, Elizabeth. "Le roman symboliste : une logique de la distinction." Thesis, McGill University, 1987. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=66264.
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Campbell, Stephanie 1983. "Le sublime, le grotesque et le meurtre spectaculaire : l'esthétique de la violence dans le drame romantique." Thesis, McGill University, 2008. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=116056.
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This thesis focuses on the representation of physical violence in the first Romantic French dramas of the 19th century. Before 1829, the Classic movement forbade spectacles of violence in the major theatres. However, with the production of the first Romantic play, Henri III et sa cour, the stage was transformed into a space of murder, physical brutality and suicide. In this study, we will interrogate the reasons for which violent acts reappear on the French stage. The influence of the guillotine will be examined as well as the sublime and grotesque nature of murder. The theories of Christine Marcandier-Colard, which explore the supreme beauty of criminality, will lead us to determine which ideologies are communicated through the depictions of death. We will also analyze the reaction of the public in regard to brutality in the theatre, as well as the role that violence plays in the development of a new society. Although violence inherently possesses a destructive value, its aesthetic value in the theatre advocates a veritable evolution of the French society towards democracy.
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Fung, Kit-ting, and 馮潔婷. "Decolonizing fictions: the subversion of 19thcentury realist fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2001. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31953001.
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Reilly, Olivia. "An epicure in sound : Samuel Taylor Coleridge and music." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.719835.
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Staton, Maria S. "Christianity in American Indian plays, 1760s-1850s." Virtual Press, 2006. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1364944.
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The main purpose of this study is to prove that the view on the American Indians, as it is presented in the plays, is determined by two dissimilar sets of values: those related to Christianity and those associated with democracy. The Christian ideals of mercy and benevolence are counterbalanced by the democratic values of freedom and patriotism in such a way that secular ideals in many cases supersede the religious ones. To achieve the purpose of the dissertation, I sifted the plays for a list of notions related to Christianity and, using textual evidence, demonstrated that these notions were not confined to particular pieces but systematically appeared in a significant number of plays. This method allowed me to make a claim that the motif of Christianity was one of the leading ones, yet it was systematically set against another major recurrent subject—the values of democracy. I also established the types of clerical characters in the plays and discovered their common characteristic—the ultimate bankruptcy of their ideals. This finding supported the main conclusion of this study: in the plays under discussion, Christianity was presented as no longer the only valid system of beliefs and was strongly contested by the outlook of democracy.I discovered that the motif of Christianity in the American Indian plays reveals itself in three ways: in the superiority of Christian civilization over Indian lifestyle, in the characterization of Indians within the framework of Christian morality, and in the importance of Christian clergy in the plays. None of these three topics, however, gets an unequivocal interpretation. First, the notion of Christian corruption is distinctly manifest. Second, the Indian heroes and heroines demonstrate important civic virtues: desire for freedom and willingness to sacrifice themselves for their land. Third, since the representation of the clerics varies from saintliness to villainy, the only thing they have in common is the impracticability and incredulity of the ideas they preach. More fundamental truths, it is suggested, should be sought outside of Christianity, and the newly found values should be not so much of a "Christian" as of "democratic" quality.Department of English
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McBriar, Shannon Ross. "Shining through the surface : Washington Allston, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and imitation in romantic art criticism." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:67bc3d1d-ad3f-4e93-b774-5055f1e350b8.
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This thesis has evolved from William Blake's phrase, "Imitation is Criticism" written in the margin of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses on Art. As a concept central to the production and criticism of art, imitation has largely been explored in the philosophical context of aesthetics rather than in terms of its practical application in image-text studies of the Romantic period. It has also traditionally served as a marker for the period designation 'Romantic', which in image-text studies continues to be played out in terms of the transition from imitative to expressive modes of making and response. Yet this notion of periodization has proven problematic in studying the response to 'false criticism' within what Wallace Stevens calls that 'corpus of remarks about painting'. These remarks reveal an important tension within imitation as a way of making something like something else, but also as a means of characterizing the relationships that underpin that resemblance. This tension not only occupies a central place in the concurrent development of art criticism and literary criticism in the period, but also offers a new foundation for the interdisciplinary study of image-text relationships in the period. The thesis is divided into two parts, each guided by the important role that imitation plays in the fight against 'false criticism' with respect to the visual arts. The first part examines the tension within imitation from the standpoint of artists and connoisseurs who expressed concern about the excesses of description in asserting the need for a credible art criticism while at the same time realizing its inevitability. The second part examines the tension within imitation from the standpoint of the American artist Washington Allston and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, both of whom used this tension to advantage in setting forth a lexicon and methodology that could account not only for the 'specific image' described, but also the geometrical and structural relationships that underpin that image.
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Smit, Lizelle. "Narrating (her)story : South African women’s life writing (1854-1948)." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/97034.
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Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University. 2015ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Seeking to explore modes of self-representation in women’s life writing and the ways in which these subjects manipulate the autobiographical ‘I’ to write about gender, the body, race and ethnic related issues, this thesis interrogates the autobiographies of three renegade women whose works were birthed out of the de/colonial South African context between 1854-1948. The chosen texts are: Marina King’s Sunrise to Evening Star: My Seventy Years in South Africa (1935), Melina Rorke’s Melina Rorke: Her Amazing Experiences in the Stormy Nineties of South-African History (1938), and two memoirs by Petronella van Heerden, Kerssnuitsels (1962) and Die 16de Koppie (1965). My analysis is underpinned by relevant life writing and feminist criticism, such as the notion of female autobiographical “embodiment” (239) and the ‘I’s reliance on “relationality” (248) as discussed in the work of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Reading Autobiography). I further draw on Judith Butler’s concept of “performativity” (Bodies that Matter 234) in my analysis in order to suggest that there is a performative aspect to the female ‘I’ in these texts. The aim of this thesis is to illustrate how these self-representations of women can be read as counter-conventional, speaking out against stereotypical perceptions and conventions of their time and in literatures (fiction and criticism) which cast women as tractable, compliant pertaining to patriarchal oversight, as narrow-minded and apathetic regarding achieving notoriety and prominence beyond their ascribed position in their separate societies. I argue that these works are representative of alternative female subjectivities and are examples of South African women’s life writing which lie ‘dusty’ and forgotten in archives; voices that are worthy of further scholarly research which would draw the stories of women’s lives back into the literary consciousness.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In ‘n poging om metodes van self-uitbeelding te bespreek en die manier waarop die ‘ek’ van vroulike ego-tekste manipuleer om sodoende te skryf oor geslagsrolle, die liggaam, ras en ander etniese kwessies, ondersoek hierdie verhandeling die outbiografieë van drie onkonvensionele vrouens se werk, gebore vanuit die de/koloniale konteks in Suid-Afrika tussen 1854-1948. Die ego-tekste wat in hierdie navorsingstuk ondersoek word, sluit in: Marina King se Sunrise to Evening Star: My Seventy Years in South Africa (1935), Melina Rorke se Melina Rorke: Her Amazing Experiences in the Stormy Nineties of South-African History (1938), en twee memoirs geskryf deur Petronella van Heerden, Kerssnuitsels (1962) en Die 16de Koppie (1965). My analise word ondersteun deur relevante kritici van feministiese en outobiografiese velde. Ek bespreek onder andere die idee dat die vroulike ‘ek’ liggaamlik “vergestalt” (239) is in outobiografie, asook die ‘ek’ se afhanklikheid van “relasionaliteit” (248) soos uiteengesit in die werk van Sidonie Smith en Julia Watson (Reading Autobiography). Verder stel ek voor, met verwysing na Judith Butler, dat daar ‘n “performative” (Bodies that Matter 234) aspek na vore kom in die vroulike ‘ek’ van Suid- Afrikaanse outobiografie. Die doel van hierdie tesis is om uit te lig dat hierdie selfvoorstellings van vroue gelees kan word as kontra-konvensioneel; dat die stereotipiese uitbeelding van vroue as skroomhartig, nougeset, gedweë ten opsigte van patriargale oorsig, en willoos om meer te vermag as wat hul onderskeie gemeenskappe vir hul voorskryf, weerspreek word deur hierdie ego-tekste. Die doel is om sodanige outobiografiese vertellings en -uitbeeldings te vergelyk en sodoende uiteenlopende vroulike subjektiwiteite gedurende die periode 1854-1948 te belig. Ek verwys deurlopend na voorbeelde van ander gemarginaliseerde Suid-Afrikaanse vroulike ego-tekse om aan te dui dat daar weliswaar ‘n magdom ‘vergete’ en ‘stof-bedekte’ vrouetekste geskryf is in die afgebakende periode. Ek voor aan dat die ‘stem’ van die vroulike ‘ek’ allermins stagneer het, en dat verdere bestudering waarskynlik nodig is.
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Schor, Ruth. "Eine alltägliche Tätigkeit : performing the everyday in the avant-garde theatre scene of late nineteenth-century Berlin." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f182a548-e450-4efa-a3a0-478461d44ab6.
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This dissertation situates late nineteenth-century Berlin's reception of naturalist drama in contemporary discourse about European modernism, which to date has disregarded the significant impact of this cultural environment. Examining the Berlin avant-garde's demand for "truth" and "authenticity," this study highlights its legacy of promoting more honest and dynamic forms of human interaction. Sketching the historical background, Chapter 1 demonstrates how the reception of Henrik Ibsen in Berlin fuelled creative strategies for a more honest approach to theatre. From literary matinees to more egalitarian ways of directing theatre, this moment in cultural history significantly shaped people's understanding of theatre as a tool for social criticism and as a means of creating a sense of intimacy. Two important figures are highlighted here: literary critic and theatre director Otto Brahm, central to the promotion of naturalism, and his more prominent protégé Max Reinhardt, who developed Brahm's legacy. Situating these developments in a theoretical framework, Chapter 2 draws on the concept of "the everyday" as set out by Toril Moi, Stanley Cavell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein to link the role of the ordinary on stage to the avant-garde's search for authenticity and truthfulness. Through this framework, Ibsen's social dramas from A Doll's House to Hedda Gabler (Chapter 3) can be seen perfectly to exemplify this shift in perspective from the 1880s through the 1890s, revealing the complexity of truthfulness in communications. Tracing these themes in other dramatic works, innovative readings of Arthur Schnitzler's Liebelei (Chapter 4) and Rainer Maria Rilke's Das tägliche Leben (Chapter 5) shed new light on these two fin-de-siècle authors. By highlighting these authors' previously unrecognised connections with Berlin's avant-garde theatre scene and their dramatic exploration of interpersonal connection, this study shows both how theatre functioned as a tool to examine human relationships and to what extent twentieth-century literature was grounded in this way of thinking.
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Moore, Richard. "Christianity and paganism in Victorian fiction." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683121.
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Wright, Charlotte M. "Plain and Ugly Janes: the Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278032/.
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Women characters in American literature of the nineteenth century form an overwhelmingly lovely group, but a search through some of the overlooked works reveals a thin but discernible thread of plain, even homely, heroines. Most of these fall into the stereotypical "old maid" category, and, like their real-life counterparts, these "undesirable" women are considered failures, even if they have money or satisfying careers, because they do not have boyfriends, husbands, or children. During the twentieth century, the old maid figure develops into someone not just homely, but downright ugly; in addition, the number of these characters increases, especially in the latter half of the century. In many works written since the 1960s, the woman's ugliness is such an intrinsic part of the story that it could not take place if she were beautiful. In subtle ways, these "ugly woman" stories begin to question the overwhelming value placed on beauty, to question the narrow definition of beauty in American society as a whole, and to suggest that the price for such a "blessing" might indeed be too high. Rather than settling for being a mere "heroine"—which still carries feminine connotations of passive behavior and second-class status—the ugly woman's increase in power over her own life and the lives of others, allows her to achieve a status more in keeping with the more "masculine" and active role of hero.
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Maximenkov, Leonid. "An analysis of the genesis and growth of literary Staliniana." Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=39503.
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Staliniana is an eclectic genre of Russian literature of the Soviet period. It deals with the fictional image of I. V. Stalin and the impact of his life and politics on history. For several decades it was the core of socialist realist literature and Stalin's personality cult.The first chapter discusses the phenomena of Stalin's personality cult in the context of the intellectual history of the post-revolutionary Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter two offers different classifications of a vast amount of fiction written on Stalin. The genesis and documented development of staliniana is discussed in the third chapter. Special attention is paid to the manipulations in the genre exercised by ideological and cultural authorities in the USSR from the 1920s to the 1970s. The fourth chapter discusses some aspects of staliniana in Western Europe as contrasted to Soviet literature. In the fifth chapter a detailed analysis of key elements of the codified literary image of Stalin is undertaken. Chapter six explores the folklore background of Stalin's cult and its interaction with the cult of V. I. Lenin. The final chapter offers an analysis of the development of the language used by Stalin as a fictional character in works of literature. This study uses the recently declassified materials from Soviet archives in order to demonstrate that staliniana was not only a key element of the Stalin cult but also a cornerstone of Soviet literature.
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Lokash, Jennifer Faith. "In sickness and in health : romantic art therapy and the return to nature." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=82920.
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This thesis explores the network of relationships among health and healing, the natural environment, and poetry during the Romantic period in Britain, and thus offers a new perspective on the Romantic relation to Nature. The context for this study is both the long and varied history that links literature to ideas of health and disease, and the intersection of the late 18th- and early 19th-century discourses of holistic science and healing that emphasize the synergy between self and world and recognize that our living environments can be either hostile or congenial to body and spirit. For many Romantic poets, illness was a painful reality that became vital to their thoughts about poetry and creativity in general. Through Wordsworth's partnership with Coleridge, a vocabulary of health and disease emerges in relation to poetic production and reception that has influenced critics of the period. It constructs the "natural" as a source of health, and establishes Wordsworth and his poetic celebrations of the therapeutic potential of nature as the often problematic legacy both for Coleridge and for second generation poets like Byron and Shelley. While composing Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto III, Byron tests Wordsworth's notion that immersion in the natural world can be spiritually therapeutic from the point of view of poetic production. The intensity of Byron's bodily existence, however, prevents him from fully experiencing the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of Wordsworthian nature. As his attempts to disengage the spirit from the body by meditating on nature actually have the reverse effect of bringing him more in touch with his physical identity, he must reject Wordsworth's methodology as a possible vehicle for healing. In refiguring Wordsworth's ideas about "taste," Shelley conceives of his poetry as healthy food for thought. His frequently used metaphors of "literature as food" have their source in his attitudes towards intake first exp
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Hill, Peter. "Utopia and civilisation in the Arab Nahda." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9f6e0ac9-04c9-4f50-b4da-8a933b0c069f.
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This doctoral thesis explores the contexts of utopian writing and thinking in the Nahda, the Arab 'Awakening' of the long nineteenth century. Utopian forms of social imagination were responses to fundamental changes in the societies of the Arab-Ottoman world brought about by integration into a capitalist world economy and a European-dominated political system. Much Nahda writing was permeated by a sense of a 'New Age' opening and of wide horizons for future change - and this was not simply illusory, but a direct response to actual and massive changes being wrought in the writers' social world. My study focusses on Egypt and Bilad al-Sham in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, from the early 1830s to the mid-1870s. An initial chapter offers a definition of the social classes and groups which contributed to the Nahda in these years - such as the Beiruti bourgeoisie and the Egyptian-Ottoman official class - drawing on the work of Arab Marxists such as Mahdi 'Amil and social historians such as Bruce Masters. The following chapters deal in detail with writings produced by three distinct cultural formations within the Nahda movement, and with different aspects of their social imagination. Chapter 2 examines the discourse of civilisation (tamaddun) through the work of the Beiruti writers Khalil al-Khuri and Butrus al-Bustani in the 1850s and 1860s. Chapter 3 deals with Nahda writers' sense of their place within the European-dominated world, mainly through translations of geography books made by Rifa'a al-Tahtawi in Mehmed Ali's Egypt in the 1830s and 1840s. Chapter 4 examines the utopian aspirations of the Nahda, through a close study of the major utopian literary work of the period, Fransis Marrash's Ghabat al-Haqq (The Forest of Justice, 1865). Finally, a conclusion places my study in relation to other recent work in the field of 'Nahda studies'.