published_or_final_version / History / Master / Master of Philosophy

My study investigates Edith Wharton's engagement with Darwin's evolutionary theory in "The House of Mirth" (1905), "The Custom of the Country" (1913), and "The Age of Innocence" (1920). The value of juxtaposing Wharton's narratives with her scientific knowledge has been recognized by critics since the 1950's. Yet, the few existing discussions of Darwinian allegory that examine these novels do not adequately describe the political dimension of Wharton's fictional sociobiology. My investigation addresses this insufficiency in the criticism. Examining Wharton's fiction in relation to her autobiographical writings, letters, and literary criticism, I demonstrate that her major novels link those laws governing gradual change in the natural world—described by Darwin, and theorists such as Herbert Spencer—with the ideological shifts affecting privileged social groupings. The introductory chapter outlines the critical response to Wharton's sociobiology, and examines specific scientific texts that the author refers to in her extra-literary writing. In chapter two I examine "The House of Mirth's" portrayal of cultural practices that lead to the elimination of unfit individuals such as Lily Bart, and show how Wharton critiques the position that natural selection and other laws theorized in The Origin of Species should apply within human society. The following chapter, on "The Custom of the Country", demonstrates Wharton's interest in representing the effects on existing leisure-class cultural practices of the newly-moneyed socioeconomic elite, whose rise Wharton attributes to social evolution. The novel also describes, I show, an inadequate leisure-class ethics that fails to confront the new elite's biological justification for expansion and dominance. Chapter four investigates "The Age of Innocence", in which Wharton takes aim at leisure-class morality by depicting it as a "negation" ( AI 212) of culturally obscured biological instinct, and by representing the sacrifice of individuals to a "collective interest" ( AI 111) that is portrayed as frivolous. In the concluding chapter, I summarize the ways I have extended existing Wharton scholarship, and describe potential pathways for future research. One key conclusion of my dissertation is that Wharton associates ideological change with natural selection, and sexual selection, in order to articulate the challenges to achieving social equality posed by "primitive" (CC 470) and "instinctive" (CC 355) energies.

This dissertation proposes the adoption of the concept of tragedy as a theological category, as a way to address the traditional problem of suffering in the natural world, customarily known as the problem of natural evil. The theological utilization of the concept of tragedy enables a Christian doctrine of creation to remain accountable to the structures and processes of the natural world, including evolutionary development. Many traditions evince an awareness of the intractability of suffering in nature and there have been various religious responses to it. Within some Christian communities, the discovery by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) of evolution by natural selection proved disruptive to established ways of addressing that issue. This disruption has been especially significant in the area of theological interpretations of creation. This is the case in part because of the way evolutionary theory reveals the role of starvation, predation, and constrained stochasticity in the development of ecosystems and organisms. Theological responses to evolution within the Christian tradition have typically failed to come to terms with these features of biological evolution. However, Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), Donald MacKinnon (1913-1994), and Rowan Williams (b. 1950) have, in different ways, shown how theological interpretations of tragedy can achieve a high degree of realism in regard to suffering, respecting the unique characteristics of individual experiences while situating suffering in a theologically meaningful frame of reference. These thinkers have also identified an awareness of tragedy within the Christian tradition itself, particularly as it is reflected in liturgical practices. This dissertation employs these insights to address the issue of suffering in the natural world, in order to contribute to a realist Christian doctrine of creation. The theological category of tragedy does not solve the problem of natural evil. But it has the double virtue of attending closely to the specifics of the natural world and maintaining a principled tension between experiences of suffering and Christian claims about the possibility of redemption.

My study investigates Edith Wharton's engagement with Darwin's evolutionary theory in "The House of Mirth" (1905), "The Custom of the Country" (1913), and "The Age of Innocence" (1920). The value of juxtaposing Wharton's narratives with her scientific knowledge has been recognized by critics since the 1950's. Yet, the few existing discussions of Darwinian allegory that examine these novels do not adequately describe the political dimension of Wharton's fictional sociobiology. My investigation addresses this insufficiency in the criticism. Examining Wharton's fiction in relation to her autobiographical writings, letters, and literary criticism, I demonstrate that her major novels link those laws governing gradual change in the natural world—described by Darwin, and theorists such as Herbert Spencer—with the ideological shifts affecting privileged social groupings. The introductory chapter outlines the critical response to Wharton's sociobiology, and examines specific scientific texts that the author refers to in her extra-literary writing. In chapter two I examine "The House of Mirth's" portrayal of cultural practices that lead to the elimination of unfit individuals such as Lily Bart, and show how Wharton critiques the position that natural selection and other laws theorized in The Origin of Species should apply within human society. The following chapter, on "The Custom of the Country", demonstrates Wharton's interest in representing the effects on existing leisure-class cultural practices of the newly-moneyed socioeconomic elite, whose rise Wharton attributes to social evolution. The novel also describes, I show, an inadequate leisure-class ethics that fails to confront the new elite's biological justification for expansion and dominance. Chapter four investigates "The Age of Innocence", in which Wharton takes aim at leisure-class morality by depicting it as a "negation" ( AI 212) of culturally obscured biological instinct, and by representing the sacrifice of individuals to a "collective interest" ( AI 111) that is portrayed as frivolous. In the concluding chapter, I summarize the ways I have extended existing Wharton scholarship, and describe potential pathways for future research. One key conclusion of my dissertation is that Wharton associates ideological change with natural selection, and sexual selection, in order to articulate the challenges to achieving social equality posed by "primitive" (CC 470) and "instinctive" (CC 355) energies. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Med Om arternas uppkomst reformerade Charles Darwin ej endast naturvetenskapens begrepp om djurrikets och mänsklighetens utveckling, utan åstadkom också ett teologiskt paradigmskifte. Medan kristenheten i Storbritannien erfor vagt motstånd mot modern läsning av Genesis, framträdde i Förenta staterna en biblicistisk antievolutionsrörelse vilken med juridiska medel ämnade obstruera sekulariseringen. Utifrån psykologiska teorier om religiös fundamentalism och konflikter i religiösa miljöer är uppsatsens syfte, att studera opposition mot darwinism i Förenta staterna och Storbritannien genom litteraturstudier av både samtida texter och senare studier. Resultatet visar, att den amerikanska antievolutionsrörelsen hade fundamentalistiska tendenser, att naturligt urval och första världskriget negativt påverkade uppfattningen om evolutionsteorin samt att känslor av förödmjukelse och skam kan varit orsak till rörelsens radikalisering på 1920-talet.

The thesis analyses the Finnish immigration apparatus through a Foucaultian governmentality framework and critiques the way immigration has been problematized. The immigration apparatus, ranging from discourses to various administrative regulations and their rationalities, is examined through the Finnish Aliens Act, Schengen visa regulations, and Finnish Immigration Services implementation documentation as well as through the related governmental bills and reports and parliamentary discussions and committee statements between 1999 and 2010. The thesis argues that the governmentality of immigration is a socio-evolutionary governmentality that relies on largely taken-for-granted conceptualisations of how society needs to be governed. The thesis shows that immigration control cannot be understood solely through the discourses of nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism, but that these discourses themselves need to be understood in the light of a state racist socio-evolutionary constellation of power/knowledge at the heart of liberal governmentality and its naturalism. In the first instance, this claim is supported by a discourse theoretical analysis of the functioning of power/knowledge in immigration-related discourses. Additionally, the claim is supported by contrasting the analysis of discourses and rationalities of governing with an analysis of technologies of governing, i.e. rules and regulations of immigration control. The thesis then questions the governmentality of the immigration apparatus through various epistemological tools of decentring. These tools highlight how a commonsensical truth about immigration and its governing is produced through methods, such as utilising explanations relying on psychologism, historicism, naturalisation, market veridiction and universalism/particularism, which enable a silence and scarcity of meaning around the taken-for-granted modes of knowing immigration and its governing. Finally, this claim about state racist governmentality of immigration is evidenced by a comparison of the contemporary way of problematizing immigration with the way immigration was problematized by early American race hygienic immigration policies. This comparison insists that eugenics and social Darwinism should not be exceptionalised, but that their rationalities of governing should be evaluated in terms of the logic of making live and letting die that they propose. The thesis concludes that unacknowledged and taken-for-granted modes of knowing the world in socio-evolutionary terms and specifically in social Darwinist terms emphasizing social position as a measure of fitness and human worth and entailing an all-inclusive logic of racialisation have an impact on contemporary liberal ways of governing immigration both in general and in Finland in, at the point at which we think how immigration should be governed so that it promotes the health and wealth of the population and defends it from degeneration.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

O presente trabalho pretende delimitar os contornos de um discurso científico/cientificista, presente de modo mais intenso no último quartel do Oitocentos, que fundamentou argumentos de projetos modernizadores da nação, quais sejam, a aplicação da teoria de Darwin à sociedade, a hierarquização racial da sociedade e a criação de uma boa mãe de família burguesa, nos moldes europeus. Estas três propostas modernizadoras foram apresentadas e discutidas nos seguintes espaços públicos de vulgarização científica as Conferências Populares da Glória, os cursos públicos do Museu Nacional e as que denominei Avulsas, pois não se encaixavam nas duas categorizações anteriores todos realizados na capital imperial entre os anos de 1870 e 1889. / The current paper intends to delimit the outlines of a scientific/scientificist speech, present in a more intense manner in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which grounded arguments of the nations modernizing projects, which are, application of the Darwin theory to society, racial hierarchization of society and the creation of a good mother of a bourgeois family, in the European molds. These three modernizing proposals were presented and discussed in the following public spaces of scientific vulgarization the Popular Conferences of Glória, the public courses of the National Museum and the ones which I have named Miscellaneous, for they did not fit into the two prior characterizations all performed in the imperial capital between the years of 1870 and 1889.

O presente trabalho pretende delimitar os contornos de um discurso científico/cientificista, presente de modo mais intenso no último quartel do Oitocentos, que fundamentou argumentos de projetos modernizadores da nação, quais sejam, a aplicação da teoria de Darwin à sociedade, a hierarquização racial da sociedade e a criação de uma boa mãe de família burguesa, nos moldes europeus. Estas três propostas modernizadoras foram apresentadas e discutidas nos seguintes espaços públicos de vulgarização científica as Conferências Populares da Glória, os cursos públicos do Museu Nacional e as que denominei Avulsas, pois não se encaixavam nas duas categorizações anteriores todos realizados na capital imperial entre os anos de 1870 e 1889. / The current paper intends to delimit the outlines of a scientific/scientificist speech, present in a more intense manner in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which grounded arguments of the nations modernizing projects, which are, application of the Darwin theory to society, racial hierarchization of society and the creation of a good mother of a bourgeois family, in the European molds. These three modernizing proposals were presented and discussed in the following public spaces of scientific vulgarization the Popular Conferences of Glória, the public courses of the National Museum and the ones which I have named Miscellaneous, for they did not fit into the two prior characterizations all performed in the imperial capital between the years of 1870 and 1889.

The dissertation Význam myšlenek Miroslava Tyrše pro výchovu a vzdělání (Miroslav Tyrš and the meaning of his ideas for upbringing and education) describes his life and the influence he had on the culture development, pedagogy and art in the Czech environment. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the sources of thoughts that inspired Miroslav Tyrš to his activities within the Czech national social life and his efforts to create the feeling of unity and reciprocity on the basis of physical abilities. The thesis is not only supposed to see Miroslav Tyrš as a patriotic trainer but especially as a scientist - philosopher, aesthete and art critic. His educational ideas were formed under the strong influence of positivistic and irrationalistic approach of the 19th century philosophy which was affected by the natural science breakthrough discoveries of that era