In 1839 the English Parliament first disbursed funds for the formal education of teachers. Between 1839 and the McNair Report in 1944 the institutional shape and the intellectual resources upon which teacher training rested changed profoundly. The centre of teacher training moved from theologically-based colleges to university departments of education; the primary source for understanding education shifted from theology to psychology. These changes altered the ways in which educators contemplated the nature of the child, the role of the teacher and the aim of education itself. This thesis probes such shifts within a variety of elite educational resources, but its major sources of material are ten training colleges of diverse types: Anglican, Nonconformist, Roman Catholic, and University. The period covered by this thesis is divided into three broad blocks of time. During the first period (1839-1885) formal training occurred in religious colleges, and educators relied upon Biblical narratives to understand education. This first period also saw the birth of modern psychology, whose tools educators often deployed within a religious framework. The second period (1886-1920) witnessed the growth of university-based training colleges which were secular in nature and whose status surpassed that of the religious colleges. During this period, teacher training emphasized intellectual attainment over spiritual development. During the third period (1920-1944), teachers were taught to view education from the standpoint of psychological health. The teacher's goal was the well-developed personality of each child, and academic content served primarily not to impart knowledge but rather to inform the child's own creative drives. This educational project was construed in scientific and anti-metaphysical terms. The replacement of a theological and metaphysical discourse by a psychological one amounts to a secular turn. However, this occurred neither mechanically nor inevitably. Colleges and theorists often seem to have been unaware of the implications of their emphases. This thesis contemplates explanatory models other than the secularisation thesis and raises important historical questions about institutional identity and the processes of secularisation.

It is often acknowledged that the sexually intermediate body destabilises sexual dimorphisms, but, so far, little attention has been paid to the way sexual intermediacy relates to normative figurations of time. Focusing mainly on literary and cultural discourses from late Romanticism to Modernism, the thesis examines how constructions of sexual intermediacy have contributed and responded to shifting concerns with temporality. It also investigates the relationship between literature and science through a comparative engagement with evolutionary, psychoanalytic and sexological discourses. The individual chapters deal with the conflicted temporality of the substantiated androgyne; the haunted and uncanny materiality of the hermaphroditic body in late nineteenth-century science and literature; sexual intermediacy and the prescriptive linear narrative of the case history; the sexual, temporal and national crises of World War I; and sexual travels in time and space. Overall, the thesis illustrates that sex and time are intimately related and shows that the changing understanding of sexual intermediacy opens up a powerful critique of sexual and temporal structures.

The aim of this thesis is to explain the relationship between industrialisation and demographic development in a mining region of northern Sweden at the turn of the twenties century. The analysis addresses the interaction between migration, family and fertility patterns at the community level. The areas of investigation are two mining communities situated in the province of Norrbotten, Kiruna and Malmberget. Most theoretical models aiming at explaining the demographic changes in Western Europe and North America during the period from early 19th to mid-20th century, have focused on key factors related to industrialisation and economic development. Local variations in family and fertility patterns have also been related to differences in industrial structure. The assumed relationship between local labour markets and demographic development in mining environments are founded on an interaction between migration, marriage patterns and marital fertility, that taken together created preconditions for high rates of reproduction. This study is guided by an attempt to include also communicative factors in the analytic framework for the analyses of family structure and fertility. In line with this strategy the conceptual scheme of Jürgen Habermas have been applied. This approach gives an opportunity to study both the relations connecting the family to the local economic system, and also the interaction between the private and public spheres at community level. The results presented here suggests that the assumed relationship between local labour markets and demographic development stipulated in the above model, was of importance only during the early and dynamic period of industrialisation and population development. However, the rates of marital fertility in the communities declined rapidly and had in the 1920s dropped to levels indicating that deliberate fertility control was practised in the local population. Explanations for changes in fertility patterns discovered in this study suggest the importance of discussions within organisations in the local public sphere. These included local trade unions and particularly women’s organisations associated with the Social Democratic Party of Sweden. The creation of female organisations in the mining communities helped answer questions regarding family structure and fertility. These organisations created the possibility for women to participate and interact in the local public sphere thereby acting as agents for female empowerment in the local environment. Second, records from the Kiruna women’s organisation reveal the influence of neo-malthusian ideas that also fuelled debates at the national level where they were adopted by the left wing of the Social Democratic Party and radical women’s organisations. Female associations and left wing radicals during the first two decades of the 20th century helped garner public support for birth control. Undoubtedly their impact help explain the decline in marital fertility observed in the mining communities. / digitalisering@umu

'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.

Following the footsteps of British merchants, Jewish merchants began migrating to China's coastal ports starting from the 1840s. Small in their number, they exerted great influence on Shanghai's economic development. The community of Jews from Baghdad, for instance, wielded enormous clout in coastal China's economic and financial markets. To fill the gap of the economic and financial activities of the Jewish merchants' community in the existing literature, this dissertation considers Jewish economic activities in Shanghai using the Kadoorie enterprise as a case study. It examines the emergence, development and retreat of the Jewish merchants' community and argues that the Jewish merchants' community seized the opportunity of the changing political and economic environment in China to engage in the capital market in Shanghai and to enlarge their influence in the Chinese economy. Through the case study of the Kadoories, this dissertation focuses on the financial side of their operations and suggests that the Jewish merchants' community in Shanghai had established their identity and status in the Far East through expanding their economic influences. This dissertation starts by analyzing how the Kadoories knocked over the obstacles on the problem of nationality and started their business in Shanghai with the British legal tools. It further investigates their methods of raising capital and highlights their economic contributions. This dissertation examines the business strategies of the Jewish merchants, as a migration diaspora given the vagaries of the global economy and the changing political situation in coastal China. It then explores the interactions and power struggles between the Kadoories and their business partners to explain the business network of the Jewish merchants and account for the building up of the economic influence of the Jewish merchants' community in China. Furthermore, the case study examines how the Jewish merchants adapted their business strategies in response to political and economic changes. Examining the economic activities of these Jewish merchants provides insight into China's economic history. The case study of the Kadoories also reveals the fluctuations in Shanghai's economy and the characteristics of economic changes in contemporary China. Finally, this dissertation highlights the retreat of the Kadoories from Shanghai after 1945. At present, the Kadoories are still conducting business in China.

The diploma thesis deals with sacral architecture in the urban structure of the Prague districts of the 19th and 20th centuries. The aim is to answer the question whether these two centuries prolong the tradition in which the urban structure responded to sanctuaries, which were often the basic starting point for new urban foundations or, on the contrary, only respond to the given urban situation. The main ambition of the work is to create a set of material from Prague urbanism to illustrate the development of relationship between sacral structures and urban space during the 19th and 20th centuries. Based on available sources, documents, catalogs, and maps, the work tries to compare new church builders with a catholic tradition without excluding the issue of minor christian churches and synagogues from the scope of the work. Keywords urbanism, sacral architecture, 19th and 20th century, Prague

Although in the German Empire the cities were major strongholds of political liberalism, this fact has until very recently attracted little attention from scholars preoccupied with the history of 'high politics' leading up to the two World Wars. This thesis is one of the first analyses of German liberalism at city level, and proceeds from the assumption that in a country with such a regionally and locally diverse political culture as Germany, this type of 'history from below' is a necessary precondition for any satisfactory understanding of the nature of German liberalism in general. Following the introduction, chapter two demonstrates that in Frankfurt, local government became politicised as early as the 1870s. Indeed, chapter three shows how the early experience of Frankfurt liberals in municipal politics was crucial as they defended themselves against emerging political groups during the following decades, particularly the Mittelstand and the SPD. The fourth chapter analyses the development of liberal attitudes towards municipal finance as a background to chapter five which uses the example of Frankfurt to demonstrate how crucial the issue of municipal finance was to the viability of local liberalism not just in theory, but also in practice. Chapter six considers the importance of education to local liberalism as it touched on a number of themes which were central to urban liberals' understanding of themselves, in particular the issues of local self-government and religion. The final chapter looks at the crucial area of social policy, to see to what extent local liberals were merely reactive, and to what extent they were innovative as they faced the new problems of urbanisation and industrialisation. The sophistication of liberal politics in local government, the only level of government where liberals were in the position of carrying out their policies, underlines the gravity of the problem which the lack of parliamentary government posed for liberals at the state and national level. Furthermore, the thesis points to a central dilemma, because, to be successful in Frankfurt and other regions, liberals had to respond to the particular culture at the local level, a requirement that was in direct contrast to the necessity of finding a coherent political consensus at the level of national and state politics. Even though at the local level the liberal capacity of responding to the social and political challenges of their rapidly changing environment has been proved beyond doubt, their policies, their rhetoric and their organisational lead could have only a very limited effect on German liberalism in general. The urban liberals' ideal of creating a more liberal society from 'the bottom up', through the cities, was undermined by the fact that the political future of German liberalism at the state and national level came to rest increasingly on its electoral appeal in the countryside, just at a time when urban liberal self-consciousness reached its peak.

This thesis analyzes the relevance of Miguel de Unamuno’s idea of Spain and its Nietzschean influence in two contemporary authors, Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Luisa Castro. My work contributes to a debate that is ever present in literature and politics: what is Spain and what defines Spanish identity. This debate has continued throughout the democratic period and reveals that Spain is still a controversial idea. The Constitution of 1978 might have shaped national identity but Spanish sociopolitical evolution has indeed questioned the idea of Spain emerged in the Transition. From my point of view, Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Luisa Castro evoke Unamuno’s ideological inheritance to offer a solution of what has been branded as the age-old problem of Spain. By the end of the nineteenth century, Unamuno introduced his theory of intrahistory in order to contravene the model of nation promoted by the political class during the Restoration. The author considered that this model imposed on society a metaphysical idealization, protected by reason, which distorted its actual national identity. Currently, the works of Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Luisa Castro reflect Unamunian intrahistory thus putting an end to this idealization. As seen in the chapters of this thesis, the combined analysis of the works by Pérez-Reverte and Castro reveals the implicit survival in our days of Nietzsche’s influence in Unamuno’s intrahistory. In this sense, they highlight the crucial role of individual subjectivity, work and interaction with their immediate environment, in the characterization of Spanish national identity. In so doing, their works reflect Unamuno’s implementation of Nietzschean theories on metaphysics, the Greek tragedy, the eternal recurrence and the overman. Pérez-Reverte and Castro’s works suggest that the solution to the problem of identity in Spain is to be found in Nietzsche’s influence on Unamuno’s intrahistory.

Annotation: The work focuses on the history of women in the 19th and 20 century. Based on a unique source, Albin Honzáková memory and preserved records, such as extensive correspondence and publications. The thesis describes the history of girls' education and related associations, but associations that participated in the gradual emancipation of the public. Keywords: Memoirs, everyday reality, 19th and 20th century, womens, feminism, education, clubs

The thesis examines the relationship between public health and questions of housing and poverty, in Melbourne, 1888- 1918. It is concerned with the way that with certain groups of people - local council workers, tenants of houses referred to as ‘slums’, and the owners of those houses - represented their experiences. And it seeks to place those representations in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century concern about the ‘housing problems’. It compares the public rhetoric of the housing reformers and politicians with letters written to the Melbourne City Council by landlords and tenants, and in doing so seeks to show that there were a whole range of housing ‘problems’ not addressed by the public discourse. (For complete abstract open document)