This thesis explores the influence of John Milton on the edges of Victorian culture, addressing temporal, geographical, bodily, and sexual thresholds in Victorian poetry, painting, and prose. Where previous studies of Milton's Victorian influence have focused on the poetic legacy of Paradise Lost, this project identifies traces of Miltonic concepts across aesthetic borders, analysing an interdisciplinary cultural sample in order to state anew Milton's significance in the period between British Romanticism and early twentieth-century critical debates about the value of Paradise Lost. The project is divided into four chapters. The first explores apocalyptic images and texts from the 1820s-Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) and the paintings of John Martin-in relation to Miltonic aetiology and eschatology. These texts offer a complex re-thinking of the relation between personal loss and universal catastrophe, which draws on and positions itself against prophecy and apocalypse in Paradise Lost. In the second chapter I address conceptual connections that cross boundaries of medium and nationality, identifying the presence of a Miltonic notion of powerful passivity in the writing and marginalia of Herman Melville and the paintings and anecdotal appendages of J. M. W. Turner. In the third chapter I consider Milton's importance for A. C. Swinburne's poetic presentation of peripheral sexualities, identifying in Milton's poetry a pervasive metaphysics of bodily 'melting' or 'cleaving' which is essential to Swinburne's poetic project. The final chapter analyses the presence of the Miltonic in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, whose repeated readings of Milton contributed to both establishing his poetic vocabulary, and prompting a career-long engagement with Miltonic ideas. The thesis refocuses attention on peripheral elements of the work of these writers and artists to re-articulate Milton's importance for the Victorians, whilst bringing together models of influence which show the Victorian Milton to be at once liminal and galvanising.

English Abstract The goal of my master thesis is to present a comprehensive study of the life and work of Sobeslav Pinkas (1927 - 1901), one of the most important Czech realistic painters. Painter's personal and artistic development is introduced in the wider historical context to allow us to understand why he had decided to become a painter. In 1948 Pinkas, as a young student of law, joined the armed revolution and personally attended the riots. Later he became a caricaturist for the Sotek magazine. His craving for democracy in the political life was mirrored in his attempts to find a new way of artistic expression. Neither the Academy in Prague nor the one in Mnichov could stand up to his expectations, and he consequently chooses Johann Baptist Berdelle as his personal teacher. Later, following a short Prague intermezzo, he, as one of the first Czech artist, leaves for Paris, where he studies under the guidance of Thomas Couture. Later on he discovers the work of Jean-François Millet and is heavily influenced by it. His conversion to the modern style of French painting wasn't received in Prague with much enthusiasm, which may be one of the reasons why he gradually, after his return to his homeland, stops painting. He became a drawing teacher at girls' secondary school; apart from that, he was a member of...

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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.

The Nauvoo Legion takes its name from the city in Illinois which was the center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early 1840's, when the Mormon militia was organized. When the Mormons were driven to the Rocky Mountains they revived the militia, in 1849, under its original title.The legislative organization of the Utah Nauvoo Legion was carried out through enactments of three lawmaking bodies, the High Council of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Legislature of the State of Deseret, and the Legislature of the Territory of Utah.

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The focus of this study is an investigation of cross-channel exchanges represented in travelogues, historical works, journalism, letters and journals written by English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh on France and by French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart on England. The work is based on the view that narratives about another culture betray preconceptions and beliefs and are never innocent descriptions. Nineteenth-century English descriptions of France, for instance, are not only marked by the stereotype of the gregarious French bon vivant but also by the often tense political relationship and economical concurrence between the two countries. French descriptions of England reflect the consciousness of England's superiority in the domains of economy, industry and colonialism as well as the stereotype of the boring, monosyllabic, haughty, egoistic and often xenophobic Englishman. Given that writings on the other culture are marked by practices and belief systems as well as notions of superiority and inferiority like texts emerging from a colonial context, ideas which have been developed in this field by scholars such as Sara Mills and Reina Lewis have been used as a basis for this investigation. I argue that the women whose texts I analyse strategically employ 'discourses of difference' (to use Sara Mills' term), or alignment and 'othering' in regard to nation, class, and political opinion, in order to gain positions which allow them to challenge contemporary ideologies of femininity. They take advantage of their positions in very different ways, according to their personal, class and economic situations, their agenda, and their gendered position within society which changes significantly during the century. The English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh construct themselves as part of the tradition of French salonnières from the seventeenth century to the present, while the French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart align themselves with English travel writers, particularly Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Through a careful construction of these foremothers, which often differed from other representations of them, they criticise gender politics in their own country and endeavour to normalise their own activities as intellectuals and writers, in the case of Tristan as a socialist and feminist activist. This strategy is complemented by 'othering' with regard to nation, class and political convictions which confers on the women an authoritative authorial voice and / or allows them to support their argument. They endorse ideologies of gender, nation and class at the same time as they reject some aspects of them. This study reveals new aspects of nineteenth-century discussions of the so-called 'woman question' through a broader approach which encompasses not only the parameters of gender, class and political orientation but also cross-cultural experience.

The first section of this paper examines the formation and portrayal of female/lesbian identity within Australian Literature with particular reference to the Bush Mythology tradition of the 1800's. Through reviewing a number of works classed as lesbian fiction it is argued that a more positive portrayal of lesbian love within Australian fiction is needed. To facilitate this shift in attitude traditional literary motifs, such as the journey and the bush, (typically the preserve of male characters) can be appropriated by a female hero. In the process of re-imagining the bushman's journey as one undertaken by a female/lesbian hero, the bush emerges as a force that can facilitate the hero on her journey toward a sense of wholeness. In keeping with the tradition of Feminist, Lesbian and Heroic literature Stringybark Summer charts the increasing self awareness of a young Australian lesbian as she journeys into the bush. The third person narrative follows the protagonist as she embarks on a journey into the unknown in order to discover the deeper meaning about her self, the world and those who share it with her. / Master of Arts (Hons) (Communication and Media)