Questa ricerca si propone di contribuire ad una prima analisi storiografica del ciclo di protesta esploso in Italia nel 1977. A nove anni dal ’68, la contestazione tornò ad agitare le università e le piazze, lottando sul terreno della creatività e dell’ironia, ma esprimendo contestualmente una forte carica violenta. L’illegalità di massa e la guerriglia diffusa finirono infatti per ingrossare le fila del «partito armato» e del terrorismo. Il ‘movimento’ degli indiani metropolitani e delle P38, proprio in ragione di questa ambiguità, fatica ancora a trovare una descrizione esaustiva, mentre la sua escalation violenta è ancora in attesa di un’eziologia convincente. Questo studio tenta quindi, in primo luogo, di ricostruire un’immagine unitaria e realistica di quel fenomeno socio-politico, a partire dalle fonti del ‘movimento’ e dalle cronache. In secondo luogo, integra la variabile istituzionale nello studio della protesta, al fine di verificare quale grado di influenza ebbe lo Stato sui processi di riattivazione della mobilitazione e, soprattutto, sulla radicalizzazione dello scontro. Il focus dell’analisi è rappresentato dall’azione assai controversa del ministero dell’Interno, allora guidato da Francesco Cossiga, che viene qui ricostruita sulla base di documenti provenienti dagli archivi di Stato. Il policing of protest è infine messo a confronto con quello della Francia dei primi anni dopo il maggio ’68, quando l’estrema sinistra minacciò una deriva violenta ma si arrestò prima di passare all’atto. / his research aims to contribute to a first preliminary historiographical analysis of the cycle of protest which spread out in Italy in 1977. Nine years after 1968, revolts started again on in the streets and inside universities. This new wave of protest was characterized by the use of creativity and humour but also by the acceptance of the violence: illegal action and urban guerrilla warfare became quite common and contributed to the expansion of the red terrorism. As a matter of fact, this ‘movement’ shows an inherent ambiguity: it put together political emulators of Dadaism with old-styled armed revolutionaries. Therefore, it is still hard and an open challenge to find an inclusive description of it and the escalation of political violence is still waiting for a convincing aetiology. The objective of this is research is twofold. On the one hand, it tries to rebuild a coherent and realistic picture of this phenomenon under analysis, adopting insider sources of the ‘movement’ and chronicles. On the other hand, it aims at integrating the institutional variable in the study of the protest, in order to verify to which extent the State was can be held responsible for the mobilization processes and, especially, for the radicalization of the social conflict. The analysis is centred on the action of the ministry of Interior and based on records from State archives. The Italian policing of protest is finally compared with to the case study of France during the first years after May 68. At that time, extreme-left activists threatened a similar escalation of violence, but they came to a halt before shooting.

The British understanding of Chinese painting owed much to Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) who enriched the British Museum’s collections of Oriental painting, and for almost forty years, published widely and delivered lectures in Britain and abroad. Binyon’s legacy is to be found in several archival resources scattered in Britain, America, Japan and China. This dissertation is a study of the reception of Chinese painting in early twentieth century Britain, and examines Binyon’s contribution to its appreciation and criticism in the West. By examining the William Anderson collection of Japanese and Chinese paintings (1881), I illuminate Anderson’s way of seeing Chinese pictorial art and his influence on Binyon’s early study of Oriental painting. I argue that the early scroll, The Admonitions of the Court Instructress, which Binyon encountered in 1903, ignited his interest in the study of traditional Chinese painting, yet his conception of Chinese pictorial art was influenced by Japanese and Western expertise. To reveal the British taste and growing interest in Chinese painting around 1910, Binyon’s involvements in major acquisitions and exhibitions of Chinese paintings at the British Museum, including the Sir Aurel Stein collection (1909) and the Frau Olga-Julia Wegener collection (1910), as well as his visits to Western collections of Chinese art in America and Germany, will be investigated. In order to understand the relevance and values of Chinese painting for the development of early twentieth-century British art, I also scrutinize how the principle of “rhythmic vitality” or qiyun shengdong, as well as the Daoist-and Zen-inspired aesthetic ideas were assiduously promoted in Binyon’s writings on Chinese painting, and how Chinese art and thought kindled British modernists to fuse art with life in order to re-vitalize the spirit of modern European art with non-scientific conceptions.

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This thesis examines selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy. It argues that a specifiable ecological ethic can be traced in their work – an ethic which is explored by them through the tensions between utopian and dystopian discourses. The first part of the thesis begins by theorising the concept of an ecological ethic of respect for the Other through current ecological philosophies, such as those developed by Val Plumwood. Thereafter, it contextualises the novels within the broader field of science fiction, and speculative fiction in particular, arguing that the shift from a critical utopian to a critical dystopian style evinces their changing treatment of this ecological ethic within their work. The remainder of the thesis is divided into two parts, each providing close readings of chosen novels in the light of this argument. Part Two provides a reading of Le Guin’s early Hainish novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed, followed by an examination of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The third, and final, part of the thesis consists of individual chapters analysing the later speculative novels of each author. Piercy’s He, She and It, Le Guin’s The Telling, and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are all scrutinised, as are Lessing’s two recent ‘Ifrik’ novels. This thesis shows, then, that speculative fiction is able to realise through fiction many of the ideals of ecological thinkers. Furthermore, the increasing dystopianism of these novels reflects the greater urgency with which the problem of Othering needs to be addressed in the light of the present global ecological crisis.

This thesis aims to analyze the events that led in the years 1791-1795 to the gradual decline of the Polish-Lithuanian state. The year 1791 was chosen as a starting point for the reason that it was during this year that the so-called Great Sejm adopted the Constitution of 3 May, considered a last attempt to reform the dysfunctional constitutional system that paralysed the political life of the Commonwealth, crippled its ability to defend itself and made it a marionette in the hands of powerful neighbours, especially Prussia and Russia. The thesis concentrates on the ambiguous role played in this period by the last king Stanisław II August. It also focuses on the opposition against the constitutional changes, associated in the so-called Targowica Confederation, the ensuing Russo-Polish War of 1792, the Second Partition of Poland, Kościuszko Uprising and the final Third Partition of 1795 - all these events are discussed in the wider context of European politics. The author makes use of sources and secondary literature in Polish, Russian, German, English and French.

The thesis targets at events which took place in the town of Prachatice and its surroundings at the end of the Second World War. It is based on written sources (filed in the State District Archives Prachatice), as well as on literature sources focusing on this topic and eyewitness memories. The first part presents a brief characterization of the town from geographical, social and economic point of view. The second chapter deals with events taking place in September 1938 when Prachatice was occupied by Nazi Germans. The third part shortly depicts the process of front war situations in Europe. The main part of the thesis consists of chapter 4 and 5 which present the way of living and events happening in the town from January 1945 to May 1945 when Prachatice was liberated by the US army. The thesis aims to connect general relations with events that happened in Prachatice and its surroundings not only to illustrate the topic from literature sources but also from people{\crq}s own memories. It tends to depict this period full of worries and hope. It is hoped to contribute to completion of the town history.

This paper attempts to develop a mathematically rigid and unified framework for neural spatial interaction modeling. Families of classical neural network models, but also less classical ones such as product unit neural network ones are considered for the cases of unconstrained and singly constrained spatial interaction flows. Current practice appears to suffer from least squares and normality assumptions that ignore the true integer nature of the flows and approximate a discrete-valued process by an almost certainly misrepresentative continuous distribution. To overcome this deficiency we suggest a more suitable estimation approach, maximum likelihood estimation under more realistic distributional assumptions of Poisson processes, and utilize a global search procedure, called Alopex, to solve the maximum likelihood estimation problem. To identify the transition from underfitting to overfitting we split the data into training, internal validation and test sets. The bootstrapping pairs approach with replacement is adopted to combine the purity of data splitting with the power of a resampling procedure to overcome the generally neglected issue of fixed data splitting and the problem of scarce data. In addition, the approach has power to provide a better statistical picture of the prediction variability, Finally, a benchmark comparison against the classical gravity models illustrates the superiority of both, the unconstrained and the origin constrained neural network model versions in terms of generalization performance measured by Kullback and Leibler's information criterion.

This dissertation examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. It focuses on the development of each of the protagonists’ identities in three realms: the individual, the familial and the societal. Additionally, it is concerned with the specific socio-political contexts in which the novels are set. It employs psychoanalytic and historical materialist frameworks in order to engage with the disparate areas of identity with which it is concerned. The introduction establishes the analytical perspective of the dissertation and explores the network of theoretical frames on which the dissertation relies. Additionally, it contextualises each of the novels, within their historical contexts, as well as in relation to the theory. The first chapter examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter. It focuses on the protagonist’s assertion of an identity independent of her father’s role as a political activist, and her eventual acceptance of the universal difficulty in negotiating a life which is both private and political. The second chapter, on Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, examines the relationship between the protagonist’s traumatic experiences as a child and her inability to assert an identity as an adult. The similarities between the protagonist’s attempts to address her traumas and thereby create herself anew and South Africa’s employment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a means to acknowledge and engage with its traumatic history is of import. The third chapter which deals with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing traces the life of its protagonist, whose identifications remain childish as a result of having witnessed her parents’ difficult relationship. Her understanding of the world is informed by a rigid, binary understanding, which is ultimately disrupted by her relationship with a black employee. She is incapable of readjusting her frame of reference, however, and ultimately goes mad. I conclude that, while my focus has been on personal, familial and social identifications, the standard terms in which identity is examined, namely, race, class, and gender, are present in each of the three tiers of identity with which I have been concerned.

Women authors in mid to late nineteenth century American society were unafraid to shed the old domestic ideology and set new examples for women outside of racial and gender spheres. This essay focuses on the ways in which Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, Louisa May Alcott's Behind a Mask, and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House represent the function of fashion and attire in literature. Each author encourages readers to examine dress in a way that defies the typical domestic ideology of nineteenth century America. I want my readers to understand the role of fashion in literature as I progress through each work and ultimately show how each female author and protagonist set a new example for womanhood through their fashion choices.

The purpose of this Master Thesis is to compare two American novel suites for young women, Louisa May Alcott‟s Little Women and Good Wives to Ann Brashares series of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The social status of women and children in the US during the 19th century is analyzed and compared historically and literary with the situation 130 years later.The main question is, what differences exist in the books and is there a connection between the changes in society and literature?The method of this Master Thesis is to make a comparative narratological analysis placed in a historical context.The result shows that the multiple character remains and enhances the identification process. Motherhood in the works of Alcott is prominent, whereas in the works of Brashares, sisterhood replaces motherhood.In Alcott‟s US during the 19th century, Christian faith was in the foreground. The goal for girls was the holy matrimony, followed by the sanctuary of heaven. Brashares depicts, in the 21st century, self-fulfilment to be aspired on earth.The strength of Alcott‟s portrayed sisterhood is weakened when marriage is consumed. In Brashares works, the love relationships are no longer the sole purpose of life and consequently not a competitor to the sisterly friendship.