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This thesis examines the major works of two outstanding European poets, Lord Byron and Alexander Pushkin, with a view to estimating the extent of their literary and personal affinity. The study begins with a survey of biographical highlights which are relevant to the interpretation of the works of the two poets. Next, the thesis demonstrates that Byron's "Oriental Tales" and Pushkin's "Southern Poems," as well as their major works, play a prominent role in the comparison of their poetic characterizations. In the examination of style, attention is limited to Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, since they are regarded as the masterpieces of their respective authors. An appraisal of the continuing fame of both poets closes the study.

This thesis offers a re-evaluation of the fiction of George MacDonald (1824-1905), both fantasy and non-fantasy. The general trend in MacDonald studies is to focus primarily on his works of fantasy, either ignoring the rest (which includes non-fantasy fiction, sermons, poetry, and criticism) or using them to illuminate the fantasies. The overall critical consensus is that these works, particularly MacDonald’s non-fantasy fiction, possess little inherent value. Though many critics acknowledge similarities between MacDonald’s fantasy fiction and his non-fantasy fiction, MacDonald has been the victim of a critical double standard that treats fantasy and realism as completely irreconcilable, and allows certain features to be acceptable, even desirable, in one form that are completely unacceptable in the other. The thesis begins by looking at MacDonald’s writings about the imagination and about literature, from which a clear theory of literature emerges, one with strong opinions about the function and purpose of literature, as well as about what makes good literature. By re-examining MacDonald’s fiction, its plots, characterization and narration, in the light of his own theories, the reasons underlying the artistic choices made throughout his fiction take on a more deliberate and calculated appearance. Furthermore, by placing MacDonald in his proper context, and looking at the diversity of generic options available to the Victorian writer, the critical double standard underlying much MacDonald scholarship, based on a strict fantasy/realism separation, crumbles. What emerges from this analysis is a different MacDonald—a careful craftsman who consciously and skillfully uses the tools of his trade to produce a unique and specific reading experience.

This dissertation situates the works of Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli and French artist Anne-Louis Girodet within a vast and heterogeneous epistemological transformation occurring in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It examines three distinct but interlocking case studies—physiognomy, electricity, and the guillotine—each of which constellates scientific discourses, representational practices, and popular attractions. Although working in separate contexts and different modalities, Fuseli and Girodet both engaged with these discourses and practices. Yet they did so in ways that also tested and undermined them. They painted bodies that emphatically failed to conform to the scientific discourses they cited; they painted bodies that were similarly unable to represent heroic virtues or legible narratives. In this way Fuseli and Girodet compel us to read the stylistic shift from neoclassicism to romanticism as participating in a significant realignment of the relationship between knowledge, representation, and the body. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, the body no longer served as a privileged agent of knowledge production within the scientific discourses and artistic practices under consideration. The physiognomic body was no longer self-identical; the electric body was no longer internally continuous. The guillotine offered, in their places, bodies without heads and heads without bodies, whose mechanisms of sensation and cognition were only ever partially and provisionally aligned.

Firstly in digression Byron presents a national reality which gradually displaces his cherished cosmopolitan ideals. Among many other pressing problems of his day, political renegades, the paradox of scientific innovations, the rise of intellectual ladies and the commoditization of marriage and family constitute the tangible part of Byron's domestic recalling. With retrospective commentaries Byron fulfills the act of imagining native land; and in this regard nationalism is the spiritual support of the expatriate existence. / I propose to comprehend the perceptive gap by focusing on Don Juan which best contextualizes Byron in the flow of historicity with the dimension of nationalism. I intend to delve into three structural units of Don Juan---digression, narrative, a lyric song---to argue that Byronic contradictions manifest nationalism in its multiple contingencies. / In conclusion Don Juan reveals that Byron's participation in the modern historicity of nationalism involves three dimensions---residual cosmopolitan ideals, English national consciousness and the independence of the oppressed nations. Don Juan embodies a historical magnetic field where Byron's existence actualizes the potential conflict of the modernity. / Secondly by reading Don Juan as the quest romance of the individual initiation, I bring the narrative into scrutiny and argue that the hero's transformation involves an implicit evolution of the national identification. In terms of subjective consciousness, nationalism embodies the mature vision of masculine selfhood. Don Juan's encounter with both female and male characters, through his repeated border-crossing, illuminates a metaphorical process from rejection to embrace of native roots, from negation to affirmation of national bonds Juan's rite of passage---sexual initiation, surviving shipwreck, the trial of the exotic love and battlefield and diplomacy---transmits a national subjectivity which corresponds to the Byronic existence of mobility. / The dissertation explores the discrepancy between critical reception towards Byron as a Romantic poet in contemporary Romantic scholarship and in Chinese historical evaluation (with certain reference to the European Continent). Byronic contradictions pose a problem to Romantic scholars who are engaged to interpret the interplay between Byron the man and Byron the poet. They share the view that Byron succeeds in manipulating his own personal image to promote his poetical visibility and tend to doubt if his poems could stand alone without the reference to his letters and journals. In China, as in many other countries of European Continent and Asia, Byron is often viewed in a more positive way as the very name has become a byword for liberal nationalism and the rebellion against tyranny / Thirdly 'Isles of Greece' adds an alternative yet prospective dimension to perceive the tension between national anxiety and modernity. In English context its meanings vary as the contextual focus shifts from poetical to socio-biographical and to existential level. The theme of the national independence is complicated by its negative elements such as the identity of the songster. In the Chinese context, 'the Isles of Greece' initiates and embodies a myth-making process as it gives vent to the anxiety of modernity faced by Chinese people in the opening of the twentieth century. The individual shaping of the 'Isles' by three Chinese intellectual pioneers symbolizes the simultaneous awakening of Chinese national consciousness and individual consciousness. The extended reading of Byron by Lu Xun, together with his reworking, voices the existential dilemma of modern enlighteners. His invocation of 'Mara poets' is prophetic of the modern intellectuals who possess both vision and willpower to eradicate ignorance and public apathy. / Gu, Yao. / Adviser: Ching Yuet May. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-01, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-173). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

In recent years the history of the garden has enjoyed increased attention within scholarly circles. Of particular interest is the history of the formation of the Picturesque garden. The ideas of three men, Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price, and Humphry Repton, are central to the evolution of Picturesque theory as related to the garden. The conflict among them has become known as the Picturesque Controversy. Due to misguided interpretations by modern scholars, however, the essence of the dispute has been obscured. Through a discussion of the development of Picturesque theory and a comparison of the actual points of difference between the above mentioned theorists, this paper proposes to expose the essential elements of the debate. It also demonstrates that, while all three participants are attempting to reach beyond the practices of their own century, it is Humphry Repton who distinguishes himself as the true herald of modern society and its attitude toward the garden.

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