This thesis traces and explicates the changes in Theodor Fontane's landscape depiction in the years 1887- 1892. I examine his novels Cecile (1887), Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888), and unwiederbringlich (1892). I show that Fontane, as though discarding a relic of the Romantic past, used increasingly less landscape in his narratives. He focused on the actions and conversation of his characters, and on their immediate surroundings. When these surroundings were urban, they tended to disappear. The progressive minimalization of landscape, and of cityscape in particular, foreshadowed the appearance in German literature of twentieth-century man: man alienated from nature in cities, and less aware of empirically observable surroundings than of internal forces and realities.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 40-41).

Mémoire (M.A.)--Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1995. / Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Texas A&M University, 2004. / Title from PDF title page. Vita. Abstract. "Major Subject: Anthropology." Includes bibliographical references (p. 354-374).

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In the nineteenth century, Orientalism functioned as a Western tool for dominating and restructuring the perception of the Orient. In France, where Orientalism found favor amongst artists, Orientalist works were produced in the literary and visual arts to inform and control the narrative about the East. Influenced by the Napoleonic imperial conquests and an increased French presence in the East, Orientalism became an integral movement in the French visual arts. The relationship between France and the Orient was one of power and domination, which was mirrored in that between the French and the Blacks. As a part of the Western perception of the Other, the black individual had a unique role in nineteenth-century France. To be black in nineteenth-century French society was to be a second-class citizen. The existence of slavery, the increase in French ethnography, and racism in French society objectified the black individual, turning them into another symbol of French power and conquest. The exploration of this project will focus on the symbolic representation of the black body in nineteenth-century Orientalist visual art. As two separate areas of exploration in Art History, Orientalism and Race Theory have seen growth in scholarship thanks to contemporary interests in race and post-colonial theory. However, the overlap between the two subject areas is limited in research. Through the analysis of black figures in nineteenth-century Orientalism, we can discover more about the role of the Black individual with respect to European society and the Eastern cultures in which they existed. This research project explores depictions of Blacks in nineteenth-century Orientalist art to clarify their societal roles and explore the imbalance of social perception and representation in nineteenth-century French society. This project will reveal the truths hidden within the depictions of the black form.

This thesis explores the relationship between the Classical Greek legacy and today’s world by examining the past two hundred years of controversy surrounding Lord Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon Marbles from Athens. Since the Marbles were purchased by the British Museum in 1816, they have become symbols of democratic values and Greek cultural identity. By considering how the Parthenon Marbles are talked about by different people over the years, from art connoisseurs and Romantic poets of the early 19th century to nationalist political activists of the late 20th century, this thesis demonstrates that the fight for the Marbles’ return to Greece is about more than just the sculptures themselves. It is about national heritage and cultural identity.

In the ancient religious imagination, catastrophic events – plagues, droughts, natural disasters – were frequently seen as manifestations of divine wrath that necessitated extraordinary ritual responses to quell. These responses frequently consisted in intensified forms of sacred violence, the most extreme of which was human sacrifice. The corpus of Greek literature is rife with myths of human sacrifice. In spite of this rich mythic repertoire, Greek artists produced scenes of human sacrifice rather infrequently and drew upon an extremely restricted range of subjects. The extant corpus of human sacrificial images totals fewer than 50 specimens and almost all of them feature the maidens Polyxena or Iphigeneia as the victim. In the Archaic era (700-480 BCE), painters and sculptors were almost exclusively interested in the sacrificial fate of Polyxena. Archaic representations of Polyxena’s sacrifice are remarkable for their overt treatment of the physical violence to which the maiden was subjected, in some cases going so far as to visualize the blood gushing forth from her perforated neck. Interest in the violent and gory aspect of the sacrificial ritual diminishes in the closing decades of the Archaic period. The title of the proposed talk, bad blood, has a twofold sense; both senses refer to the underlying subject of belief and to the main arguments of this paper: The first sense is idiomatic and indicative: Polyxena’s sacrifice was a matter of bad blood, since it resulted from the need to placate the wroth and aggrieved ghost of Achilles, who denied the Greeks safe passage home until he was granted the spoils due to him (cf. Eur. Hek. 35-44; Quint. Smyr 14.324-338). The second, more literal sense is interrogative: To wit, was the shedding of Polyxena’s blood bad per se? While Greek authors of the Classical period and beyond suggest that human sacrifice was universally condemned as an unthinkably barbaric offense and a violation of ritual norms, earlier extant literary sources offer no such clear ruling. However, this situation changes when the small yet iconographically remarkable group of pre-Classical visual representations of human sacrifice are considered. In these images, one may detect a diversity of attitudes or positions on the ritual of human sacrifice, individual as well as collective, that range from acceptance to outright repudiation. This range of attitudes is not, however, neatly confined to the proverbial frame of the image or the mythical context of the event. Like the mythic cast of characters, contemporary ancient viewers were meant to participate in the discursive dynamic, bringing their individual beliefs and attitudes to bear on the scene and its significance. In other words, these representations imply a multiplicity of attitudes (and the beliefs that inform them) among the implied viewers of these artworks.