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<p> The purpose of this thesis is the reconstruction of the geography of Huronia during the first half of the 17th century. Six broad, interrelated and basically geographical themes constitute the major portion of the thesis: the delimitation of the settled area; the physical characteristics of the area in as much as they relate to the Huron occupance; population estimates for the period; settlement patterns; the subsistence economy; and the interrelated facets of politics and trade. Where necessary sociological factors were introduced to give geographical patterns greater meaning. In attempting such a reconstruction and interpretation of a past landscape some emphasis is placed on the func­tional relationships that existed between the various cultural and natural phenomena in the landscape. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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The subject of medicine in the works of Moliere has been traditionally treated as a matter of satire. While it is important to consider this view and while biographical approaches relating Moliere's personal illness to the content of his medical comedy are illuminating, this study proposes that a plurality of views offers a more complete picture. Such analysis discovers that Moliere's medical comedy is much more than satire, that it contains elements of black humor and even approaches the theater of cruelty in its treatment of sickness and death. The metaphor in this approach is in the perception of a composite image of this part of Moliere's theater, much like the pattern that a kaleidoscope discloses. As we may sort out the various elements that compose the kaleidoscopic impression--light and shadow, color, form, change of image through manipulation of the instrument--there is a similarity in the division of elements in Moliere's medical theater. Light and shadow correspond to the opposition of fact and fantasy in seventeenth-century French medicine and constitute the historical view of his work; color corresponds to the notion of Galenic humor theory and suggests that the comedy of character may be analyzed according to humoral temperaments; form corresponds to the language Moliere used in his medical plays; the change of image occurs in Moliere with the passage of time--his medical comedy being farcical at the beginning of his career and much darker towards the end of his life. The purpose of this approach is to identify these separate elements in order to better understand their function as an organic whole. For this reason, the notion of organic unity is also treated. In an effort to relate Moliere's theater to the present day, this study compares Moliere's work with Artaud's notion of the nature and function of theater, with the two meanings of semiology--sign theory and symptomatology, and using an archetypal approach, concludes with the suggestion that sexuality, death, and medicine form a hidden mythology in these plays.

Since her work as a professional playwright in the 1670s and 1680s, critics have sought to equate Aphra Behn and her plays, to fix and stabilize the body of the writer and of her work. She has been marked as a prostitute, a feminist, and a masculinist hack, in each case her gender determining the value of and audience for her writing. This dissertation argues that Behn's plays--and Behn--should be read in terms of her controlling tropes and forms of performance and intrigue. Her plays and her presence use these tropes and forms to decenter the idea of identity and manipulate conventions of gender roles in the patriarchal Restoration theater. In doing so, she recasts and reconstitutes the structure of the patriarchal theater and economy. Chapter 1 introduces my argument and presents an overview of critical and feminist responses to Behn. I use this overview to present my own view of identity as performance, opposing such essentialist theorists as Helene Cixous. Chapter 2 develops the historical and metaphorical associations of intrigue and performance, beginning with her Preface to The Dutch Lover; in reading two of her lesser-known intrigue-comedies, The Dutch Lover and The Feign'd Curtezans, or a Night's Intrigue, I then argue that performance and intrigue challenge the conventional engendering of roles such as the rake and the courtesan. Chapter 3 expands these associations and reads her economic metaphors, as I look at Behn's most famous intrigue-comedy, The Rover, and its sequel; as well as challenging conventional roles and economic valuations, however, The Rover, Part II emphasizes the ultimate inescapability of these roles and valuations in the patriarchal theater. Chapter 4 moves to her town-comedies; I argue that Behn adapts the intrigue-form to her comedies of manners, working out the characters' struggle between convention and nature to define public and private selves. Sir Patient Fancy sets up the power that the manipulation of convention offers; The City Heiress emphasizes the limits of such manipulation; The Lucky Chance offers magic and ambiguity as new theatrical possibility to subvert convention and recast role.

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