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Master of Arts / Department of History / Andrew Orr / The end of the Second Boer War in 1902 gave rise to cultural and political action of Afrikaners within the colonial governments and among the South African people. These actions caused a rise in Afrikaner cultural and political nationalism. Though the British emerged victorious from the war, resentment for the British Empire was widespread in the South African colonies due to brutalities suffered by the Afrikaners during the war. This resentment would later be channeled by Afrikaner leaders and used as a political weapon. The British wished for appeasement with the Afrikaners and established terms at the end of the war that Afrikaner leaders were able to use to further Afrikaner culture through politics. The military victory for the British influenced many Afrikaners to trade violence for political and cultural means of resistance. Throughout the years 1902-1924 the Afrikaner people established strategies through politics, literary publications, and new political groups, developed in the years 1904-1908, to advocate for Afrikaner nationalism and cultural equality amongst the British in areas of law, commerce, and education. The war showed the futility of military resistance against the British, but inspired many to push for political and cultural resistance, unification, and eventual dominance. Afrikaner nationalist dominance in South Africa began with the efforts of the Afrikaner leaders and people in 1902 after the Second Boer War.

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Although much has been written on the 1930s as a period of ferment and innovation in New Zealand’s literary culture, the immediate post-war period has remained largely unexamined. As an outcome, literary histories have tended to downplay the significance of the Centennial publications and overlooked the impact made by the literary-cultural periodical to the post-war literary economy. The formulation of a conversation within the pages of the journals and the associated creation of the culture-critic were central to the cultural nationalism of the period 1947-61. It is argued in this thesis that the ‘long fifties’, the years from the cessation of the Second World War through to the early sixties, were a discrete moment in New Zealand’s literary history. To understand the success of the journals as a form of intervention their founding needs to be traced not only to Phoenix and Tomorrow – journals of the thirties – but also to the programme of publishing that was part of the 1940 Centennial celebrations. Under the leadership of J. C. Beaglehole and E. H. McCormick, the Centennial publications contested the existing structures of cultural authority that lay with the amateur historian and the literary criticism of the ‘bookmen’. Beaglehole and McCormick professionalised the discourse of history writing and literary criticism through the introduction of academic practice, and, significantly, a rigorously critical engagement with the formation of national identity. Their critical engagement acted as an encouragement to the founding of the literary-cultural journal during the late 1940s: Landfall begun publishing in 1947 and Here & Now followed in 1949. This thesis argues, however, that alongside these two independent journals there needs to be placed the Listener under the editorship of M. H. Holcroft, and that these three publications created sites where the imaginative could sit next to the critical, and that this development was based on the belief that the absence of a critical undertaking would stunt the growth of the culture’s imaginative and creative undertaking. During the period 1947-61 the development of a specific form of intervention in the writing of the culture-critic can be detected. The culture-critics sought to actively engage the reading public in a conversation; therefore, they wrote for the periodicals in a style that was accessible but discriminating; they understood that they had a specific function within society. Furthermore, the primacy attached to the cultural authority of Brasch and Landfall is contested, and it is instead claimed that an exclusive focus on Landfall distorts the overall temper of the post-war years. Landfall was but one site where the developing national consciousness was published and assessed; it was a disputatious time.

This dissertation explores the role played by Kurdish theatre in the Kurdish national struggle in Iraq especially between 1975 and 1991. First, it traces the development of Kurdish theatre, within the socio-political context in Iraqi Kurdistan, from its emergence in the 1920s to the defeat of the Kurdish nationalist movement and the fall of the Kurdistan region under the direct Baath rule in 1975. It will then explore the Kurdish resistance theatre during the Baath rule and will analyse the representation of Kurdish nationalist identity in four dramas produced during the Baath rule between 1975 and 1991. By analysing the nationalist themes in the works of Ehmed Salar and Telet Saman, two prominent playwrights and directors of the late 1970s and the duration of the 1980s, I will argue that despite strict censorship during most of this period, theatre played a critical role in the Kurdish national struggle by staging Kurdish history, mythology, folklore, and re-enacting oppressed histories. Along with the thematic analysis of representative dramatic texts from the period and interviews with Kurdish theatre artists, this research draws on Kurdish theatre histories, historical documents, and journalistic accounts, to reveal how theatre participated in the Kurdish national struggle and how it responded to political changes in different historical periods.

In Russia and Argentina modernism arrived well before the advent of socioeconomic modernization, and found societies with restricted civil liberties, only nascent middle classes, and virtually non-existent public spheres. Despite these factors, within a span of some fifty years, Petersburg and Buenos Aires turned into vibrant literary capitals rivaling London, New York, and Paris as centers of literary modernism. This dissertation offers a new understanding of the period by exposing the critical role of publishers and cultural patrons in this extraordinary cultural advancement. I argue that they were able to reformulate their countries’ historically ambivalent positions vis-à-vis Western European civilization by working closely with avant-garde literary groups and viii promoting their literary works that combined sometimes contending, sometimes complementary cosmopolitanism and nationalism. My analysis of the interrelated processes of the development of print culture, national identity, and the literary public sphere in Russia and Argentina is informed by Benedict Anderson’s thinking about nationalism and print culture, Pierre Bourdieu’s treatment of publishers as key participants in cultural production, and the concept of the public sphere as seen by Jürgen Habermas. Close reading of select literary works of the 1920s shows that Russian and Argentine “peripheral” experiences, once transformed into artistic creation, became consonant with cultural practices of international modernism precisely because they combined both cosmopolitan and nationalist tendencies. Each of the writers considered—Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, Veniamin Kaverin, and Konstantin Fedin—was able to formulate highly original and yet unmistakably national response to modernity. Following the writers’ trajectories from early literary experiments to the works of the late 1920s, when they renounced their youthful deviations and joined the literary (and sometimes even political) establishment, I show how these literary texts renegotiated the issues of national identity by reworking diverse and often “foreign” literary traditions into authentically Russian and Argentine prose. / text

The thesis examines and explains the background events to the architecture of the University of Edinburgh during the years 1949-65, when Sir Edward Appleton was the Principal. The four books that constitute the thesis each take different perspectives on the progress of the post-war expansion project. Appleton had to reconcile Edinburgh's policy to reintegrate dispersed University departments within the city-centre with a rapid and unprecedented and expansion in higher education. Selection of sites was the subject of a prolonged and heated debate, which is related in Book One. Aided by a formidable array of architectural talent, Appleton persuaded the local and national authorities that the controversial George Square development, in tandem with a separate suburban site for science expansion, would produce the most desirable outcome. The second book discusses the style of architecture that was produced, looking at the pre-war background of the Edinburgh School architects: William Kininmonth, Basil Spence, Robert Matthew and Alan Reiach. The influences are traced to Scandinavia and the architects' preoccupation with cultural nationalism. These factors combined with the ethos of reconstruction and the City's ambitions for cultural regeneration to create architecture with a resonance particular to its time and place. How, and why, this is regarded as Festival Style is explained. The academic and social objectives of the Universities, as directed by Humanists and Christians in influential positions, were crucial to the architectural outcome, and these are investigated in Book Three. A large amenity centre was planned for the University area and an important purpose-built halls-of-residence development achieved at a site near the city-centre in consequence of this. Edinburgh's own tradition, emanating from Patrick Geddes, played a significant part in the development of residences and student amenities, particularly the rehabilitation of a large 17th century building in the heart of the Old Town. Finally, in Book Four, the relationships between the architects and the theoretical antipathies they encountered are considered. The University provided a forum for interaction between the architects, with Matthew emerging as the dominant figure, advising Appleton on architecture and planning, and ultimately setting up a University Department of Architecture. For him, the University project was part of a social mission and architecture its tool. Kininmonth, the first post-war architect to the University, was displaced by Matthew's arrival. Spence's approach to urban design was crucial in the realisation of the George Square project, and yet he too was replaced when that was achieved. All of these architects encountered the dichotomies of Modernity and Tradition, and Science vs. Art, though with differing responses. Architects and University ultimately experienced the conflict between pragmatism and idealism. Viewed in its context. the achievement of Appleton was remarkable and, as a result, the University of Edinburgh must be considered the most extraordinary patron of architecture of the period.

The purpose of this project is to establish Joan Lavis MacDonald (1871–1962) as the intellectual and philosophical companion of her spouse, Canadian painter J.E.H. MacDonald. Her journals and articles are central resources in this reconstruction of the life and circumstances of a woman living in southern Ontario, Canada at the end of the Victorian-era. By the dawn of the twentieth century, urbanization, industrialization, opportunities for women to pursue post-secondary education, and social reformations found Joan Lavis at a point of conflict between the newly-available educational opportunities and traditions of homemaking, and the thesis is divided accordingly. Although the points of conflict are examined separately, the thesis nonetheless affirms Joan Lavis MacDonald's ability to combine the two by drawing on cultural and art movements like transcendentalism and the arts and crafts movement. The thesis moves beyond the male-dominated sphere in which the Group of Seven operated to examine Joan Lavis MacDonald as a contributor, and in turn influenced by, the distinctly Canadian domestic environment that permeates J.E.H. MacDonald and the Group of Seven’s insistence that nature is synonymous with Canaian-ness. This creates additional space for women in a national history intertwined with ideals of masculinity that are in turn fabricated by men, and studies an important art movement from outside the mythologized individuals and locations that have become indivisible from it. Thus, the thesis also creates a new avenue by which J.E.H. MacDonald may be studied and understood. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis argues that ‘fairy writing’ in the nineteenth-century Scottish literature serves as a peculiar site which accommodates various, often ambiguous and subversive, responses to the processes of constructing new national identities occurring in, and outwith, post-union Scotland. It contends that a pathetic sense of loss, emptiness and absence, together with strong preoccupations with the land, and a desire to perpetuate the nation which has become state-less, commonly underpin the wide variety of fairy writings by Walter Scott, John Black, James Hogg and Andrew Lang. The disappearing fairies and elusive fairy queens who haunt subterranean realms, together with the immaterialised and etherealised homeland, are frequently depicted in the works of fairy writing explored in this study. While they metaphorise the loss of the state, the rightful monarch and the old national identity, they also serve to symbolically, and strategically, immortalise the Scottish nation through mythification and romanticisation within the subliminal textual layers of fairy writing. Choosing four authors in Scottish literature, this thesis explores the spectrum of the wide range of fairy writing created during the long nineteenth century, shedding new light on the contrast, as well as the echoes, between Romantic and Victorian writing. It specifically suggests that fairy narratives by Black and Hogg display ironic self-consciousness of those who were involved in the processes of cultural nation-building in the post-union Britain. This thesis also contends that Scottish fairy writing serves as a problematic site of experimentation where different genres, values and ideas clash and conflict, generating intensified tension, and rarely bringing negotiation without haunting aftertaste. It is contended that genre-mixing is a common methodological feature employed by the four authors, and moreover, that the act of genre-mixing itself is metaphorical of the creation of new and hybrid national identity, which also foregrounds its artificiality, inventedness and internal cracks. This study reassesses a long-forgotten material: The Falls of Clyde (1806) by John Black. It also draws attention to the relatively ‘marginal’ texts by Scott and Hogg, and attempts a radical interpretation of Langian works, arguing that Lang played a significant role in the processes of the diasporic re-imagining of Scottishness which were arguably undertaken outside Scotland by Briticised elites, and are a neglected yet important part of post-Union Scottish nation writing. Drawing on a wide range of texts and paratexts, this study foregrounds a profound complicity in the conceptions of Scotland and national identity inscribed in fairy narratives, perceiving the sub-genre as a site of realism rather than fantasy.