This report offers an analysis of the ways in which two eighteenth century georgic poems, John Dyer’s The Fleece and William Cowper’s The Task, mediate evangelical and imperial practices. Through an inquiry into the recent critical intersection between Kevis Goodman’s media focused research into the georgic and Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s similarly inflected inquiry into the Enlightenment, this report suggests that the didactic, agricultural musings of Dyer and Cowper betray a deep engagement the consequences of imperialism and the execution of Britain’s dawning evangelical charge. / text

Thesis--Kiel. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [vi]-viii) and index.

Thesis--Kiel. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [vi]-viii) and index.

The least popular of all her novels, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) depicts a heroine, precariously situated in the margins of the aristocracy, who is intellectually educated rather than accomplished. As the timid Fanny Price navigates the morally fraught social world of Mansfield Park, Austen comments on the exclusion and mistreatment of women in the British public sphere at large as well as criticizes the practice of educating women into accomplishment as exemplified by the sparkling socialite, Mary Crawford. This thesis positions Austen in context with educational writers William Cowper, the poet, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosopher. I analyze all three writers’ messages about education, along with the implications of the genre/form with which they choose to enter public discourses, including the poem, the political tract, and the novel. Considering the historical and cultural conceptions of the novel as trivial and feminine during Austen’s day, her decision to employ this form suggests that she is interested in reforming the novel into a platform for serious public engagement. Austen ultimately anticipates the Victorian novel by revealing the form’s potential value as intellectual exercise and an important tool for women to join public conversation. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The end of the eighteenth century witnessed an imaginative mass migration as authors wrote about withdrawing from society. This thesis traces the origins of 'Romantic reclusion' in the works of Cowper and Wordsworth, particularly Cowper's poem The Task and Wordsworth's unfinished masterwork The Recluse, which epitomise the tradition. Romantic reclusion differs from 'solitude' and 'retirement' in that its motives were social. Cowper and Wordsworth wrote about withdrawing in order to criticise the increasing commercialism and competition they saw in British society. Both poets imagined seceding into a community of individuals who would care for a shared set of values, envisaging this as a form of non-violent political protest leading to reform. The thesis builds on recent studies of Romantic community, and develops Raymond Williams's cultural criticism, to refute the New Historicist position that Romantic writing elides history. It proceeds by historicising Cowper's and Wordsworth's concepts of reclusion, tracing echoes of their extensive reading about this subject in what they wrote. Romantic reclusion emerges as an artistic attempt to defend the individual against the dehumanising effects of contemporary society. Its aims can be grouped under four interrelated headings-'creative', 'medical', 'political', and 'natural'-which form the basis of the chapter divisions. Chapter One argues that Cowper and Wordsworth both presented Milton as a precedent for their poetic reclusion. They withdrew from literary society and cut themselves off from the diction of eighteenth-century poetry, because they believed that it turned words into luxury items which could only be purchased by the imaginations of a few. Cowper's translations of Madame Guyon and Wordsworth's modernisations of Chaucer both attempted to develop a plain style which would unite a wider, non-hierarchical community of readers. Chapter Two explores the origins of Cowper's reclusion in his spiritual crisis of 1763-5. Beginning with a study of medical books owned by Cowper's doctor, Nathaniel Cotton, it argues that Cotton regarded Cowper's illness as a product of eighteenth-century models of sociability. Both Cowper and Wordsworth employed Robert Burton's concept of 'Honest Melancholy', or sorrow for the state of one's country, to critique social competition and call for new models of community. Chapter Three examines Cowper's and Wordsworth's presentations of reclusion as the best response to the violence of the American and French Revolutions. Drawing on the works of Classical and modern historians, both poets argued that political revolutions would only succeed once individuals learned to renounce self-interest and govern their selfish passions. The 'retired man' becomes the unexpected political hero of The Task, which in turn forms the basis for Wordsworth's conception of The Recluse. Finally, Chapter Four explores Cowper's and Wordsworth's interests in natural theology, arguing that both poets built on the works of writers including Calvin, David Hartley, and Joseph Butler to explain the psychological mechanism by which reclusion in nature could help to reform the mind, eliminating the selfish passions and teaching individuals to live in an active, mutually responsible community.

Orientador: Marco Lucio Bittencourt / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Mecanica / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-09T12:36:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Martins_DanielLeonardo_M.pdf: 3435063 bytes, checksum: 5e1595f9983245a24712a596e4b1f0a1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007 / Resumo: Este trabalho apresenta uma metodologia de otimização de forma aplicada a estruturas submetidas a cargas de impacto, de modo a aumentar sua capacidade de absorção de energia de impacto. Para isso, é necessário conhecer as propriedades mecânicas dos materiais empregados em tais estruturas, as quais são obtidas através de uma metodologia de abordagem dupla experimental- otimização. São obtidos os parâmetros ótimos das leis constitutivas de Cowper-Symonds e Johnson-Cook para materiais sensíveis à taxa de deformação que melhor se ajustam aos respectivos dados experimentais. Finalmente, esses parâmetros são utilizados na análise de uma estrutura complexa, a qual tem sua capacidade de absorção de energia de impacto melhorada utilizando a Metodologia de Resposta da Superfície / Abstract: This work presents a shape optimization methodology applied to structures submitted to impact loads in order to improve their crashworthiness. To this end, it is necessary to know the structural material properties, which were obtained using a dual experimental-optimization methodology. Optimum parameters are obtained for the Cowper-Symonds and Johnson-Cook strain rate sensitive constitutive laws which best fit the material experimental data. These parameters were then used in the analysis of a complex structure, which is crashworthy optimized using a Response Surface Methodology / Mestrado / Mecanica dos Sólidos e Projeto Mecanico / Mestre em Engenharia Mecânica

Representations of the Gypsies and their lifestyle were widespread in British culture in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis analyzes the varying literary and artistic responses to the Gypsy figure in the period circa 1780-1870. Addressing not only well-known works by William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, John Clare, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot, but also lesser-known or neglected works by Gilbert White, Hannah More, George Crabbe and Samuel Rogers, unpublished archival material from Princess Victoria's journals, and a range of articles from the periodical press, this thesis examines how the figure of the Gypsy was used to explore differing conceptions of the landscape, identity and freedom, as well as the authoritative discourses of law, religion and science. The influence of William Cowper's Gypsy episode in Book One of The Task is shown to be profound, and its effect on ensuing literary representations of the Gypsy is an example of my interpretation of Wim Willem's term ‘paper Gypsies': the idea that literary Gypsies are often textual (re)constructions of other writers' work, creating a shared literary, cultural and artistic heritage. A focus on the picturesque and the Gypsies' role within that genre is a strong theme throughout this thesis. The ambiguity of picturesque Gypsy representations challenges the authority of the leisured viewer, provoking complex responses that either seek to contain the Gypsy's disruptive potential or demonstrate the figure's refusal to be controlled. An examination of texts alongside contemporary paintings and sketches of Gypsies by Princess Victoria, George Morland, Thomas Gainsborough, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable and John Everett Millais, elucidates the significance of the Gypsies as ambiguous ciphers in both literature and art.