This dissertation presents the life story of Freda Diesing, artist, teacher, and the first Haida woman known to become a professional carver. Diesing holds the Haida name Skilquewat, which translates as the descriptive phrase "On the trail of Property Woman." This phrase makes an appropriate title, as it reflects both the research process and the form of the written result. Diesing's life is not presented here as a monolith discovered, singular and clearly bounded, but rather as an organic accretive identity, constantly in the process of construction and negotiation. Diesing defines herself in relation to her mother and her grandmother, and her stories tell how they negotiated their own identities during times of rapid cultural change. For all three women changes in Haida culture under pressure from wider Canadian society tended to emphasize the role of women in the domestic sphere, as wives and mothers, while mmimizing their wider political and social impact. Diesing, a woman of mixed ethnic decent, who married late, has no children, lives only on the mainland and grows increasingly independent and active as an elderly widow, resists easy classification. She performs her own identity variably, depending upon her audience. By developing her identity as a Haida artist and teacher Diesing has been able to negotiate a position of continuing respect and influence appropriate to her chiefly heritage, despite inauspicious circumstances in her own life and in the contemporary history of the Haida people. Yet it is not being recognized as an artist or a master carver that has been Diesing's primary intention. Rather she has used her art itself as a tool in achieving a goal she defines as most important: helping both Natives and non-Natives understand and take pride in the indigenous cultural heritage of the Northwest Coast. More than an artist, Freda Diesing is a teacher. Through the stories she tells, and through her own life's example, she reminds us all of the continuing vitality of Northwest Coast cultures, and especially of the important contributions of women in Coastal society.

This dissertation argues that edifying dialogue is an appropriate and satisfying component of historically critical biography. It has been a part of biography. The edifying and critical intent is traced through pre-modern biography to demonstrate that this was the case in the Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Early Christian and Medieval eras. Key authors examined include the author(s) of the Pentateuch, the Gospel writers and the authors of the Biblical epistles, Herodotus, Polybius, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Athanasius, Jerome, Sulpicius Severus, and John Capgrave. It can be a part of biography even given the challenges of contemporary theory posed by the extreme positions of positivism and postmodernism (or their chastened re-formulations). Important authors discussed in this section include Arthur Marwick, Keith Jenkins, David Harlan and Peter Novick. It is a part of some biographies meant for a particular audience (such as feminist works). And hopefully it will be increasingly looked upon as the preferred way of writing biography. My dissertation follows these stages. I begin with what biography has been and argue that the Greek and Roman historians believed that the intent of biography was critical and edifying. In fact, critical and edifying intent is notable also in Biblical and medieval biographies. The next section argues that edifying discourse is compatible with both traditional and postmodern theories of history-writing. The third section of the dissertation moves from theoretical considerations to the work of two notable Christian historians, George Marsden and Harry Stout. I note that these two scholars in particular are, in theory, open to my argument but that they can hesitate to engage in edifying discourse in biography. Finally, I briefly examine a few authors who write edifying and critical biography. Toril Moi, Carolyn Heilbrun, and the Bollandists are discussed in this section.

Il nous a semble qu'une these sur Colette etait opportune. Les theses vont certainement etre nombreuses dans les annees a venir sur les aspects particuliers de notre auteur, comme son style, sa psychologie feminine, la nature, la morale de Sido, les betes. A l'heure actuelle, pourtant, aucun travail d'ensemble ne nous semble avoir ete fait, c'est pourquoi nous avons essaye de combler cette lacune avec notre etude. Nous n'avons pas suivi la methode utilisee par Larnac qui consistait a suivre la vie de l'ecrivain et la publication de ses oeuvres dont il donne un resume, puis de faire ensuite des considerations generales. Nous avons divise notre travail en trois grandes parties: (1) Une etude biographique nous a semble indispensable car la vie de Colette est inseparable de son oeuvre, et il n'a pas encore ete dresse de biographie complete. (2) Nous avons voulu montrer ensuite quels etaient ses sujets et nous avons detache ceux qui dominent tous ses ouvrages: l'amour, la nature, les betes. (3) Enfin, nous avons examine son art. Il nous a paru evident que l'essentiel de la valeur de notre auteur tient dans son style. Alors que Rousseau a invente le style de la sensibilite, Colette nous semble avoir cree ce qu'on pourrait appeler le style de la sensualite. Pour notre conclusion, nous avons essaye de voir s'il etait possible de degager un "message" de Colette, et si nous pouvions trouver une signification morale ou philosophique a son oeuvre. Ici, notre difficulte est beaucoup plus grande, car on ne trouve aucun systeme de pensee discursive. Aussi, nous nous sommes efforces de montrer ce que son oeuvre parait impliquer dans ce domaine.

This dissertation is a study of the shifting presence of religious groups in nineteenth-century British public life. It concentrates on Unitarians, a denomination little studied by historians but who were one of the key groups enfranchised in the period around 1830, and examines how religious leaders made sense of both increasing political opportunities and increasing religious sectarianism. Its focus is James Martineau and the generation of denominational leaders who came of age after 1830 and their use of Romanticism to transform the traditional Nonconformist principle of religious liberty into a call for free theological inquiry. Making use of letters, diaries, newspapers, pamphlets and magazine articles, this dissertation shows how Martineau and his allies moved beyond the theological legacy of Joseph Priestley, transformed congregational life, reformed the denomination and reached out to other religious liberals in mid-Victorian Britain. They were among the first religious thinkers to endorse developmental science and German Biblical scholarship. In sharp contrast to many evangelical Nonconformists who radicalized religious liberty into a campaign for the abolition of Established Churches, Martineau and his followers hoped that the government would guarantee free theological inquiry. Martineau hoped to reform the Church of England into a non-dogmatic national religious community, but the growth of agnostic science and the Liberal embrace of popular politics undermined Martineau's vision. Although Martineau's career ended in failure, the demise of a vision of public life grounded in Nonconformist principles underscores the paradoxically conservative nature of religious change in nineteenth-century Britain. Martineau and his allies played a crucial role in broadening British religious and intellectual life, but the Anglican Church and its associated educational institutions proved much more successful representatives of that culture.

A leader of the student movements in 1968, a pioneer of homosexual liberation in the 1970s, and a lifelong critic and polemist of French society, Guy Hocquenghem published some twenty books and literally hundreds of articles before his premature death in 1988. This dissertation is a biography of Guy Hocquenghem. However, although it makes ample use of personal interviews and other biographical information, its chief aim is not to psychologize but to contextualize. Its primary orientation is that of the history of ideas, an approach that is more concerned with the relationship between ideas and society than with the logical consistency of the ideas themselves. The present work endeavors, first of all, to explain the evolution of Hocquenghem's ideas and assess his impact as both a philosopher and a militant on French society after 1968. In addition, because Hocquenghem's career is, in many respects, emblematic of the journeys of the French '68ers, it uses his intellectual and political trajectory to describe general patterns that he shared with his generation. More specifically, it relies on Hocquenghem's career to illuminate a critical but often overlooked and misunderstood dimension of the May '68 revolt and its legacies: the eruption of "everyday life" into French politics. Finally, this dissertation aims to contribute to the rehabilitation of Hocquenghem's reputation as key militant, significant philosopher, and consummate polemist of the French '68 generation. In doing so, it is not Hocquenghem's ideas themselves that it seeks to redeem so much as his unique utopian perspective.

Rudolf Rocker was born in 1873 in Mainz, Germany, and died in 1958 in New York. During his life, Rocker witnessed a rapidly changing world, and he extensively documented these changes. In a microcosm, Rocker's life reflects the development of the various trends within the anarchist movement, of which he was a prominent member. He joined the anarchist ranks at an early age, and to his last breath he remained an ardent believer in the goals and principles of anarchism. Rocker's main philosophical concern had been personal freedoms and the ability of society to protect these freedoms by non-coercive means. Rocker rejected the morality of all forms of authority, whether state, party or privileged minority. The only form of organization condoned by him was that of workers' federations or syndicates. In Rocker's vision, these federations would serve as the basis for creating a federated Europe, and ultimately a federated world order. A disciple of Peter Kropotkin, Rocker established his prominence in anarchist philosophy as the ideologue of anarchosyndicalism, his main contribution being the combination of theoretical anarchist theses with a practical syndicalist platform of action. Rocker's most important contribution to political philosophy, Nationalism and Culture, contains both a comprehensive analysis of the rise of national sentiments, and a theoretical attempt to refute the morality of the state. Rocker left his mark on anarchist history not only as a theoretician, but also as a practitioner. He was particularly active among the Jewish immigrants in London's East End, where he organized a cohesive and militant anarchist group. He led the local workers in industrial struggles against the "sweating system," and for two decades Rocker, a gentile with no knowledge of Yiddish, edited the Jewish anarchist organ, the Arbeter Fraint. In 1923, Rocker became known internationally due to his role in founding the Syndicalist International, the aim of which was to halt the growing influence of the Comintern. Despite his political activities and writings, Rocker's life remained a neglected chapter in the history of anarchism. Drawing extensively on Yiddish sources, this work attempts to save Rocker from his undeserved oblivion.

Historians are unfamiliar with the frontier attorney. We know little of who he represented, what types of cases he litigated and his day-to-day labors. Nathaniel Hart Davis practiced law in Montgomery, Texas from 1850 to 1883; by examining his career we may shed light on these issues. Davis specialized in civil law. Debt collection dominated his practice, but he also litigated land disputes, probate, slave law and divorce cases. He represented the propertied citizens of Montgomery, nearly always acting on behalf of the plaintiff. His energies were devoted primarily to out-of-court tasks: gathering information, tracking down debtors, buying and selling real estate for speculators, and disposing of probate property and debts. Davis was not the stereotypical incompetent, ignorant, parasitical frontier attorney. A cautious, learned man, Davis fulfilled a vital role in his community. He tried to ensure relatively smooth business transactions in an unstable Texas economy.

Stevie Smith's work not only prefigures a key debate in contemporary feminism between essentialists and social constructionists, but also the more current debates that have developed as the constructionist position continues to be explored. She takes an anti-essentialist position as her inaugural point and explores the limits of agency in redefining gender identities against established cultural signification. Novel on Yellow Paper is best understood in the context of autobiographical fiction, a genre which maintains that identities are always to some extent fictional and, therefore, subject to self-invention. Smith challenges the notion of a fixed, female essence by utilizing a strategy of multivocality. Pompey, the protagonist, adopts a variety of voices which situate her as a product of literary and social discourses and prevent her cooption into a stable subject suitable for matrimony. In Over the Frontier, however, self-construction seems less ideal. It carries the potential for self-destruction. Smith reveals the failure of androgyny as a solution to the woes of femininity and shows that a woman impersonating a man exposes the category "man" as a subject-position inhabitable by either sex. Smith's hat poems serve as clear examples of the risks and possibilities involved in refashioning gender. Hats serve as vestimentary signs that either reify or reformulate traditional gender identities. Beneath Smith's hats are bodies, not The Body, capitalized, abstracted, and theorized solely as a text inscribed by history and culture, but particular bodies which, in their differences, bear the marks of socialization. In her poetry, she most often tropes female bodies as prisons; in order to escape essentialist definitions associated with those bodies, she revises fairy tales to imagine physical transformations that transport women into other bodies and alternative sexualities. Similarly, the drawings that accompany her poems subvert poetic statements which appear to endorse "proper" feminine concerns and traditional, masculine literary values.

Lynnwood Farnam, who lived from 1885 to 1930, was considered by most of his contemporaries to be the greatest organist of his day. He came from a close-knit family in a small Canadian town, and his precocious musical gifts led to a scholarship at the Royal College of Music in London at age fifteen. Qualities that characterize his entire life may be observed in correspondence, diaries, notebooks, and scrapbooks from his four years of study there. These have been preserved in the Lynnwood Farnam Collection at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, along with numerous other personal items. Farnam began his professional music career in Montreal, moved to Boston in 1913, and ultimately ended up in New York at the Church of the Holy Communion in 1920. His professional philosophy combined church and concert work into one musical career, as exemplified in his extensive twilight concert series. He also undertook several European and American concert tours, and befriended many of the greatest organists and organ composers of the era. His untimely death at age forty-five elicited an extensive public outpouring of grief. Characteristics of Farnam's playing universally cited time and again by critics include a prodigious manual and pedal technique, an incredible gift for utilizing the myriad of tone colors available on the organ, and a choice of repertoire entirely idiomatic to the instrument. His personal standards of programming and performance would ultimately raise the standards of the profession, and his regular inclusion of Bach's works and earlier compositions would inspire later generations of players to examine and perform this repertoire. Farnam also extensively promoted compositions by his contemporaries, often leading to their eventual inclusion in the standard organ repertoire. Farnam was appointed to head the Organ Department at the Curtis Institute in 1927, and taught some of the most significant players and teachers of the next generation. Through them, his influence extended to future generations of organists.

The study of Ginastera's three Piano Sonatas can be viewed as an example of the composer's general development. The historical context in which Ginastera lived is an important departure point. His native country, Argentina, was originally the home of the Incas who practiced music, although at a primitive stage. The first foreign influence was the Spanish colonization in 1516. After Argentina's independence in 1816, the figure of the gaucho appeared; it was a legend of the pampas and a constant source of inspiration for the Argentine nationalistic culture. A new European immigration further reinforced western music in Argentina and inspired the country in its search for a cultural identity. Ginastera's output is often catalogued in three periods: Objective Nationalism, Subjective Nationalism, and Neo-Expressionism. A parallel can be drawn between Ginastera's evolution as a composer and Argentina's development as a cultural entity. The first Sonata shows the influence of Bartok and Stravinsky as well as Argentine folk elements, among which we recognize the guitar symbolism. The second Sonata goes back to the pre-Columbian era, inspired by primitive Indian melodies and rhythms. To these Ginastera adds an advanced atonal language, including chromatic clusters and microtone effects, thus bringing the dissonance to an extreme level. The third Sonata mixes both sources of inspiration. As a synthesis of the previous two sonatas, it shows a tendency towards balance and greater economy. All three works show an evolution, but also reflect similarities: the importance of the third interval, the melodic exaltation, the strong rhythms, and the sense of magic.