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Systems of Order: The satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh is a study of Evelyn Waugh’s satire. It offers a contextual reading of eleven works by Waugh, presenting revisionist readings of familiar novels and according attention to previously neglected works. It aims to sketch out the main features of Waugh’s satire, including Waugh’s lexis and the use of certain key images and motifs. Comparative analysis of Waugh’s satirical novels with works by contemporary writers such as Clough Williams-Ellis, Wyndham Lewis, Stella Gibbons and T.S. Eliot brings into sharp relief the techniques and targets of Waugh’s satire. ¶ This thesis argues that despite Waugh’s tongue-in-cheek denial of satire’s efficacy in a complacent modern world, he did indeed write satire of a peculiarly twentieth century kind. Waugh’s apparently anarchic novels reflect, behind the detached insouciance of their narrators, the moral standards which the novels ostensibly claim are absent in the modern world. ¶ In Waugh’s writing, satire is effected through the creation of systems of literary order. The structure and patterning of his novels, and his masterful use of the rhetorical techniques of satire, mete out punishment on a formal level. Waugh’s satirical novels dramatize the tension between truth, order and civilization, and their oppositions, disorder and barbarism. Systems of Order suggests that from the very first, Waugh’s satiric project aimed toward the repudiation of modern disorder.

This work is a study in some detail of the political history and development of Laos since 1975. The contents include: Origin of the Lao Modern Political Ideology; Backgrounds of the Lao Communist Party; Development of Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP); The LPRP as a ruling party; New economic policy 'Chintanakarn Mai'; Future directions of the LPRP. Several maps, tables, charts and photographs are included in the research / Master of Arts (Hons)

This Professional Doctorate in Midwifery explores the development of maternity services in New Zealand subsequent to legislative changes in 1990 enabling midwives to provide the same services as doctors and access the same funding for the provision of care for childbearing women. The papers in this portfolio describe and analyse challenges faced by New Zealand midwives in achieving their full potential as autonomous health professionals and the strategies they developed to survive within a healthcare environment that despite changes, remained medicalised. Throughout this portfolio, a theoretical framework based on complexity theory provides a lens for critique of the varying challenges to midwifery development and strategies to progress the profession. The seven papers that make up this portfolio were developed and written over a five-year period from 1999 to 2003. During this time I was involved in various activities supporting midwifery in New Zealand, including the establishment of a postgraduate midwifery programme and participation in the refocusing of both the New Zealand College of Midwives and the Midwifery and Maternity Provider Organisation. These activities took me to various parts of the country, enabling me to maintain contact with midwives from a variety of settings. The first paper sets the scene for the portfolio by exploring the socio-political context of contemporary midwifery in New Zealand. The second paper tracks the emergence of a theoretical framework out of Complexity theory and presents a set of principles, which guide the critique of midwifery services and professional development, explored in the subsequent papers. Part Three documents the development of a contextual scanning tool, used to analyse the organisation of maternity care by midwives in rural settings. Part Four presents the findings of the scan and strategies for consolidating the role of midwives as key providers of maternity services in rural localities. Part Five documents the development of a programme for optimising midwifery leadership within the health sector, while Part Six explores the risks and opportunities for midwives with the development of clinical governance strategies by District Health Boards. Part seven focuses on strategies to increase the potential for midwives to consolidate, maintain and further develop community-based maternity services throughout the country. This portfolio provides an organisational analysis of contemporary maternity services in New Zealand and presents a multifaceted approach to securing midwifery as a key health profession and midwives as the main provider of maternity services to women in this country. The findings of this collection of works, identified midwifery in New Zealand as precariously positioned within a rapidly changing health service environment. While appearing most vulnerable, midwifery within the rural and primary settings appeared to offer the most potential for innovative development in order to secure the place of midwives as the prime providers of health care for women in childbirth.

As cultural studies has consolidated its claim to constitute a distinct field of study in recent years, debate has intensified about its characteristic objects, concepts and methods, if any, and, therefore, its relationship to traditional disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In History in Australian Popular Culture 1972-1995, I focus on an intersection of cultural studies with history. However, I do not debate the competing claims of 'history' and 'cultural studies' as academic projects. Rather, I examine the role played by historical discourse in popular cultural practices, and how those practices contest and modify public debate about history; I take 'historical discourse' to include argument about as well as representation of the past, and so to involve a rhetorical dimension of desire and suasive force that varies according to social contexts of usage. Therefore, in this thesis I do cultural studies empirically by asking what people say and do in the name of history in everyday contexts of work and leisure, and what is at stake in public as well as academic 'theoretical' discussion of the meaning and value of history for Australians today. Taking tourism and television ('public culture') as my major research fields, I argue that far from abolishing historical consciousness -- as the 'mass' dimension of popular culture is so often said to do -- these distinct but globally interlocking cultural industries have emerged in Australian conditions as major sites of historical contestation and pedagogy. Tourism and television are, of course, trans-national industries which impact on the living-space (and time) of local communities and blur the national boundaries so often taken to define the coherence of both 'history' and 'culture' in the modern period. I argue, however, that the historical import of these industries includes the use of the social and cultural spaces they make available by people seeking to publicise their own arguments with the past, their criticisms of the present, and their projects for the future; this usage is what I call 'popular culture', and it can include properly historical criticism of the power of tourism and television to disrupt or destroy a particular community's sense of its past. From this it follows that in this thesis I defend cultural studies as a practice which, far from participating in a 'death' or 'killing' of history, is capable of accounting in specific ways for the liveliness of historical debate in Australia today.

This thesis focuses on the rise to prominence, during the 1980s and 1990s, of a coterie of African American intellectuals associated with the powerful networks and institutions of the New Right. It situates the relatively marginalised phenomenon of contemporary black conservatism within its historical context; explores the nature and significance of the racial discourse it has generated; and probes the intellectual character of the individuals whose contributions to this strand of black thought have stood out over the past three decades. Engaging the writings of the major black conservative figures and the literature of their supporters and critics, I then evaluate their ideas in relation to the key debates concerning race and class in American life debates that have centred, for the most part, on the vexed issues of affirmative action, poverty and public education. In illuminating this complex, still largely misunderstood phenomenon, this thesis reveals the black conservatives as more than a group but as individuals with their own distinctive arguments.