This thesis seeks to relate the forms of liberal nationalism, which emerged in Scotland and Quebec between 1899 and 1914, to the character of the institutions which governed. The substantive focus is on two liberal nationalist groupings: the Young Scots' Society and the more loosely grouped Ligue nationaliste canadienne. Their emergence is examined at three levels: imperial, federal and local civil society. / The British Empire exerted an overarching influence on both Scotland and Quebec. Yet each enjoyed a very different relationship to the empire. Liberal nationalists responded differently to the same policies---the South African War, Tariff Reform and the Naval Question. The Young Scots invoked Liberal principles: freedom of speech, free trade and disarmament. The Nationalistes' response was nationalist: these were encroachments on Canadian sovereignty. Yet both groupings shared a liberal conception of empire, characterised by autonomy and decentralisation. / Scotland and Quebec enjoyed a 'federal' relationship to their states (Britain/Canada). Deficiencies in these systems prompted different responses. The Young Scots campaigned in support of a Scottish Home Rule Parliament. The Nationalistes favoured a Canadian federation which was avowedly consociational, one which recognised Canadian duality. These were liberal measures of accommodating difference. / Finally, Scotland and Quebec possessed distinctive civil societies. Yet they differed in the degree to which they were governed by liberal norms. In Scotland a liberal ethos was sustained by both the dominant Liberalism and Presbyterianism. However in Quebec the dominant Catholic church sought to preserve its hegemony over francophone society against Liberal challenges. Liberal nationalists not only reflected the distinct national character of their civil societies but also the degree to which those societies were governed by liberal norms. / It was these configurations of institutions and norms which ensured that the nationalisms which emerged in Scotland and Quebec were liberal in character. Yet there were important differences: greater emphasis was placed on Liberalism in Scotland ("Liberal nationalists") while the emphasis was on Nationalism in Quebec ("liberal Nationalists"). The character of empire, federalism and civil society in Scotland and Quebec shaped the nationalisms that emerged between the Boer War and the First World War.

This study explores how successful Alvin Plantinga is in his contention that belief in God can be obtained and maintained in a basic way that attains and retains rationality for reflective persons. Plantinga indeed calls into question any confident presumption that theistic belief is epistemically irresponsible. He not only seriously challenges the necessity for propositional evidence to be available for such belief to be justified, he also supplies significant support for the conclusion that it remains legitimate even if it faces a preponderance of contrary considerations. However, Plantinga does not convincingly demonstrate that basic theistic belief merits privileged status by virtue of a character sufficiently analogous to paradigmatic perceptual, memory and ascriptive beliefs. Nor does he adequately argue its independence from the bearing of evidentialist concerns, especially regarding its background moorings. He needs to do more work to show the full warrant for theistic belief.

On numerous occasions Ricoeur has characterized the goal of his philosophical analyses as the "exchange of the ego, master of itself, for the self, disciple of the text." Our investigation follows the development of this theme through careful examination of Ricoeur's phenomenological-hermeneutical philosophy. By way of contrast with Husserl's phenomenology we see how Ricoeur initiates a program of self-recovery that decenters consciousness from the immediacy of self-grounding radicality. Looking instead to the polysemic world of the text, Ricoeur chooses a path of indirect imaginative mediation as the route towards self-interpretation. / The imagination, correlative with the works of culture (signs, symbols and texts), forms the central core of Ricoeur's understanding of selfhood. Already operative in his early publications as the mediating structure of selfhood, the work of imagination is transformed from a transcendental third term into a linguistic process that constructs sonorous worlds in front of consciousness for the self to inhabit. / Ricoeur's analysis of metaphor and narrative shows selfhood to be a task accomplished by means of linguistic interpretation. However, such an interpretation of the self, with the textual world as its other, is a linguistic construction that is caught up in semantic self-identification. Ricoeur's program for the exchange of the self-enclosed ego, for a self discipled by the text, becomes entangled in the semantics of identity to such an extent that selfhood is equated with the objectifications of the reflective process and is never dealt with on the intimate level of the reflexive structure of the self in relation to otherness. This has significant consequences which need to be critically examined by philosophy of religion.

This thesis examines the professional musical stage of Montreal in the decade following the First World War. Throughout the 1920s, almost all of the city's musical theatre attractions were foreign in origin, and were staged by American, French, and British roadshow companies, arriving mainly from New York City. Analysis of Montreal's musical theatre entertainment and satellite relationship with Broadway highlights the growing cultural influence of the United States upon Quebec society in the interwar period. As a northern outpost of Broadway, Montreal was directly affected by the profound transformation of the entertainment industry of the United States. After peaking in the second half of the decade, the musical stage of Montreal was gradually supplanted by the decline of the roadshow system, the advent of the sound film, the onset of the Great Depression, and the resurgence of local stock theatre companies. / The northern extension of Broadway into Montreal heightened divisions within Montreal society between a growing middle class of businessmen, managers, and other professionals who embraced modernity and cultural change, and more conservative forces who favoured the traditional Quebec based on religious and nationalist values. While the musical attractions sent northwards from Broadway were a popular divertissement for a large proportion of Montrealers from all social classes and linguistic backgrounds, they were abhorred by the province's clerical and nationalist elites and their supporters who regarded them as a threat to the survival of traditional French Canadian values and culture.

This thesis will examine the relationship between art, nationalism and identity as it appears in the context of the 1967 Montreal Universal Exposition. "Expo 67" saw a confrontation between Canadian and Quebecois expressions of nationalism, and we will concentrate on this aspect as it appears through the artistic representations in the different national pavilions. / We will also look into the artworks presented by young Quebecois artists in the more marginal "Youth Pavilion" situated on Ile Sainte-Helene, and will explain how this new generation of artists was able to take advantage of the particular context of the Universal Exhibition in order to implement its own concept of national identity, an identity closely related to popular culture, and thus very different from the image projected by the Quebecois elite of the time.

This thesis analyzes the problems and contradictions inherent in modernity's levelling of the fabricative and political realms. Seeking a broader perspective on the origins of aesthetic culture and aestheticized politics, it examines the relation of architecture to technology, culture, and politics. The thesis examines the consequences of the Enlightenment and "Radical Enlightenment" (understanding the rise of the modern nation-state as a direct consequence of the 18th century's yoking of history and nature) from the perspective of Japan and its encounter with modernity. Japan as a modern nation-state, neither part of the European Enlightenment nor colonized by its instruments, was able to initiate a unique discourse around the question of history and the concomitant issues of identity and nihilism. / The thesis tracks the discourse through architecture as the terms shift and become more and more indistinguishable from the Western manifestations from which the Japanese architects wished to claim distinction. / The discussion on difference and possibility---cultural identity and the creative project---as fundamental questions for a contemporary practice of architecture is undertaken through an analysis of the polar positions of Tange Kenzo and Shirai Sei'ichi.

This thesis is a study of important trends in Natal art of the period 1910-1940, with a section on related architectural developments. In Chapter One Natal's colonial background and continued dependence on Britain for cultural guidance is discussed. The foundation of art galleries and the Natal Society of Artists is followed by an examination of artworks produced until 1917. These were found to be mainly Victorian in character. Reliance on British art and an admiration for and emulation of the Royal Academy of Arts strongly influenced the organisation and development of the Natal Society of Artists. Chapter Two examines the desire, during the 1920s and 1930s, to break away from foreign influence and the conscious attempts to establish a "national" style. This phenomenon is traced through the development of landscape painting in Natal. Chapter Three, Survival versus progress, explores the relationship between the artist and the Natal public, in particular those artists who experimented with what were then held to be avant-garde styles. An uninformed public and, consequently, a pronounced hostility towards modernism bad a profound effect on the careers of many artists. Chapter Four concerns the status of the practising artist in Natal. Amateurs outnumbered professionals at all major exhibitions, and the majority of these amateurs were women. Professionalism and amateurism are defined in the text.) The history of the Durban School of Art and its role in the promotion of professionalism ends this survey on art trends. Architectural development during this period is summarised in Chapter Five with reference to the correspondences between art and architecture. Examples are architectural decoration (especially sculpture and faience), stylistic trends, the response to modernism, and the professional status of the architect. Artists and architects active in Natal during the period are identified and listed. This section includes lists of representative works and detailed references. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1986.

Playwright, Sarah Kane emerged as a new voice in British writing in the early 1990s. Her work, recognized most notably for its shocking content, was the source of media hype, and rendered her work, with that of her peers, as In-Yer-Face Theatre. This dissertation analyses the use of shock in Kane‟s work, with particular reference to her first and last plays: Blasted and 4.48 Psychosis. I discuss the shock elements employed by Kane in these texts and consider the reasons behind their use, particularly Kane‟s break with realism and subversion of form. My research draws upon social constructionist thought as a strand of the larger discourses of postmodernism, in particular those which inform the existence of war, violence and trauma. Focusing too, on the work of theatre practitioners such as Antonin Artaud, whose „Theatre of Cruelty‟ is reminiscent of Kane‟s own theatre. I discuss the origin of In-Yer-Face Theatre as well as its forerunners by examining Post-War British Theatre from the 1940‟s, especially those plays that have resonated on a provocative level. My research also explores the social and political factors influencing theatre over the decades and in relation to Kane, particularly the Thatcher government of the 1980s. I argue that the social and political climate of the 1980s and 1990s played a direct role in the formation of Kane‟s theatre and examine Kane‟s work and its reception in relation to other playwrights of the time. I have deliberately chosen to locate my research in terms of British theatre. / Thesis (M.A. (Drama and Performance Studies)) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

This dissertation explores the origins of, and the developments among, the approximately one hundred Bible schools that existed in western Canada prior to 1960. Although these schools influenced thousands of people, they have been almost entirely ignored by scholars, thereby leaving a significant lacuna within Canadian religious historiography. This study demonstrates the vital role played by the Bible schools in the development of evangelical Protestantism in western Canada. / The numerous Bible schools in the region are divided into six clusters based on denominational or theological similarities. A representative school (or schools) is selected from each cluster to serve as the focus of an institutional biography. These biographies explore the circumstances surrounding the origin, and subsequent developments (up to 1960) within, each school. The multiple institutional biographies create a collage that is both comprehensive enough to provide an understanding of the movement as a composite whole, and sufficiently varied to illustrate the movement's dynamic diversity. / This dissertation, therefore, presents a more multi-faceted explanation of the movement than previous characterizations that have generally depicted it as a part of an American fundamentalist reaction to Protestant liberalism. Although fundamentalism was a significant influence within some, particularly the transdenominational, Bible schools, at least as important in understanding the movement in western Canada were the particular ethnic, theological and denominational concerns that were prominent within the denominational clusters. The Bible schools typically offered a Bible-centred, intensely practical, lay-oriented program of post-secondary theological training. They were an innovative and practical response to the many challenges, created by massive immigration, rugged frontier conditions, geographical isolation, economic hardship, ethnicity and cultural assimilation, facing evangelical Protestants during the first half of the twentieth century. The Bible schools represent an institutional embodiment of the ethos and emphases of their respective constituencies. They served the multiple denominational and transdenominational constituencies, which made up the larger evangelical Protestant network, as centres of influence by preparing future generations for church leadership and participation in Canadian society. The Bible school movement offers a unique window into the diversity, complexity, dynamism and flexibility that characterized the development of evangelical Protestantism in western Canada.

The aim of this thesis is to give an account of the position taken by certain women dramatists in the context of both box-office success and theatre criticism in Brazil in the latter half of the twentieth century in order to provide a panoramic view of the way the Brazilian theater canon reacts to the work of women authors, by either incorporating it or not, according to political and social circumstances. It is hoped then that a more comprehensive vision of these dramatists will result than that of the traditional academic criticism which either elevates by acceptance or dismisses by ignoring or playing down their work. The production of three dramatists will be analysed here, namely, those plays by Leilah Assuncao, Maria Adelaide Amaral and Isis Baiao which fall into the period 1969--1999, and which exemplify two key tendencies in the Brazilian theatre of the last thirty years. These tendencies are: first, the attempt to widen the traditional horizon of politicized theatre by adding to its socio-political concerns a focus on the individual and his/her particular agenda, and, secondly, the break with any specifically aesthetic or conceptual format on stage in a blurring of the legacies of tradition and the vanguard, in which a "hybridism" of form and language is particularly noticeable in the privileging of a kind of writing that is not bound by formal limits. Such an analysis has made it possible to highlight how determined types of reaction may be altered along the time when different interpretive parameters are used by the critical community and by the public. While a certain sympathy is shown here for the feminist reading of the ideological bases of the literary canon, this is done not only to corroborate the masculine bent of such a canon to the exclusion of the Other, but also to prove that the criteria regulating excellence are products of a specific ideology which changes according to its sociohistorical context. The ultimate goal here is, thus, to make