Discussions of British travel to Greece in the nineteenth century have been dominated by the work of Lord Byron. Byron’s contemporary Greeks were Orientalised, while antique Greece was personified as a captive Greek woman on the brink of compromise by the Ottomans, or a cadaver. Throughout the nineteenth century this antique vista was employed by the tourist industry. This thesis offers a consideration of the visions and vistas of Greece encountered by British women who travelled to Greece in the subsequent years, especially in the light of how commercial tourism limited or constructed their access to Greece. Commercial tourist structures were in place in Athens and other major sites of antiquity, but the majority of the women considered here travelled through a terrain that went beyond a narrow and museum staged experience of Greece. Three paradigms have been established for women travelling in Greece: the professional archaeologist, the ethnographer, and the tourist. The women archaeologist combated the patriarchal domination of the classics, not only to posit a female intellectual who could master Greece, but also reveal how antique Greece was used to underwrite patriarchal British ideologies. The ethnographers in Greece are a mixed collection of semi-professional and professional ethnographers, considered alongside more conventional travel narratives, all of which offer discussions of the modern Greek psyche trapped at a series of liminal fissures (East/West, antique/modern). Concentrating on women and geography, they subtly conflate the two to read nation in gender. However, without the sexualised aspect of their male counterparts, they read Greek women through a series of diverse practices that they identify through a close contact that could only be established between women. The modern tourist in Greece offers the most enduring and lasting type of traveller in Greece. Travelling with and against guidebooks, the discussion considers the visual technologies that helped to codify the way Greece is still seen as a tourist destination. In conjunction with this, the popular discourses denigrating women’s travel are also discussed, which offers a key reason for the dismissal of their literary output.

Whilst transport has repeatedly been identified as an integral component in the tourism system, the relationship between urban public transport networks and visitor behaviour at urban destinations remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, tourist transport is rarely the subject of the same quality benchmarking techniques that are applied to other elements of the tourism product. The thesis reviews the use of service quality and customer satisfaction measures in urban tourism and urban public transport, highlighting dimensions of urban public transport quality which may be of particular relevance to overseas visitors at urban destinations. The results of a survey of overseas visitors to Greater Manchester, employing both quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques, are subsequently presented, identifying factors affecting the use of public transport by overseas visitors to Greater Manchester. Attributes of public transport service quality, revealed by the research to be of importance in measuring overseas visitors’ satisfaction with urban public transport performance in Greater Manchester, are reduced by means of principal components analysis to reveal the underlying dimensions of overseas visitors’ satisfaction with Manchester’s public transport system. An ensuing regression analysis reveals the relationships between the dimensions of public transport performance, overall satisfaction with public transport and satisfaction with Manchester as a visitor destination. Additionally, an importance-performance analysis is employed to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of public transport service in Manchester from an overseas visitor perspective. The implications for destination management are discussed.

This PhD project examines changing conceptions of physical exercise and bodily health in eighteenth-century France. Enlightenment culture in Europe provided an atmosphere of reform within which both society and individual were viewed as malleable. A new criterion of social utility governed discussions of health and education, and highlighted the unreformed status of certain sections of society. There was an understanding in France that urban life generally, and the urban elite in particular, had degenerated. The idleness of the gens du monde was considered a significant factor in the corruption of modern French society; the physical languor it produced was seen to render people useless to the nation. Fears surrounding depopulation and military weakness gave further impetus to calls for reform. Good health and the physical strength associated with it were perceived to key to the reversal of both urban decline and military fragility. The mother-to-be, the child and the noble officer were targeted in the drive to produce healthy, virtuous citizens. The thesis argues that a transformed conceptualization of physical education, emerging from a preoccupation with preventive medicine, was central to ideas regarding the health and strength of the nation. Drawing on manuals concerned with health and education, discussions of health in the press, polemics on the function of the nobility, and the correspondence of the Société Royale de Médecine, a distinct shift is traced in the ways in which exercise was discussed in the second half of the century. This was characterised by a view of exercise which focused upon adding strength and vigour, in contrast to earlier accounts which defined movement as a means of balancing or stabilizing what entered or exited the body.

My primary concern in this thesis is to develop a framework in which classical and modern dance can be analyzed and assessed in philosophical terms. This should not be understood as an endeavour to create a system of values according to which dance should be criticized. What is being attempted is to describe and characterize dance with the tools provided by different aesthetic theories. Moreover dance, and especially ballet (due to its more solid and concrete structure and form), is used as a test - βάσανος (vasanos) in Greek - to help discern the limitations of existing aesthetic theories. At the same time the different criteria that each theory puts forward to identify a work of art are related to the notion of movement, which is central to dance. This process not only enables us to distinguish the elements of this complex form of human action, but also becomes the starting point for the elaboration of a reconfiguration of aesthetic concepts that will enable a sophisticated analysis of the phenomenon of dance. The underlying question throughout is "What makes a particular movement sequence a piece of dance rather than, for example, a piece of gymnastics?" complemented by the question "What makes an everyday life movement a dance movement?" These issues are addressed by considering how the various aesthetic theories can help us make the above distinctions. The different forms of dance are correlated with the aesthetic theories presented. The first notion I consider in this context is mimesis with special reference to Jean-Georges Noverre's account of dance, which has its roots in Aristotle's Poetics. Secondly I consider the notion of beauty - its independence from such notions as 'purposiveness', its lack of 'interest' - as analysed in Kant's Critique of Judgment. The expressive element of dance is explored in the context of R.G. Collingwood's expressivism and John Maftin's inflection of it in relation to dance. Attention to movement leads directly to the notion of form, which is explored in dialogue with André Levinson and Margaret H'Doubler. The thesis concludes by sketching an outline of a new way of approaching, understanding and hence potentially even experiencing dance (as a viewer). Dance is a carrier of a multiplicity of meanings with various contents. In the majority of cases a dance performance seeks to communicate a message to an audience. It is being suggested that dance constitutes a type of language, a communicational system, which has mimetic, expressive and formal elements. The notion of language is understood in later Wittgenstein terms. It is argued that dance comprises a 'form of life.' The elements of this system are facial expressions, movements of hands and arms, shifting of the body; all these reveal to us the quality of experience and feelings of the moving persona. Dance should be understood and appreciated in this particular context.

This thesis sets out to investigate gardens, gardeners and gardening practices in early modern England, from the mid-sixteenth century when the first horticultural manuals appeared in the English language dedicated solely to the ‘Arte’ of gardening, spanning the following century to its establishment as a subject worthy of scientific and intellectual debate by the Royal Society and a leisure pursuit worthy of the genteel. The inherently ephemeral nature of the activity of gardening has resulted thus far in this important aspect of cultural life being often overlooked by historians, but detailed examination of the early gardening manuals together with evidence gleaned from contemporary gentry manuscript collections, maps, plans and drawings has provided rare insight into both the practicalities of gardening during this period as well as into the aspirations of the early modern gardener. By focusing on the ‘ordinary’ gardens of the county gentry rather than the ‘extraordinary’ gardens of the aristocracy and courtly elite, this study seeks to answer such questions as who was gardening, why they were gardening, how they were gardening and how, ultimately, they viewed the spaces they had created, offering a new perspective on the defining of status and identity in early modern society.

Oxidative stress and inflammation are two reciprocally linked processes that characterise many disease states, but can also transiently increase in response to a range of stimuli, including exercise, to initiate adaptation. This thesis presents novel data indicating that oxidative stress did not increase in response to an acute mental arithmetic challenge, under resting conditions or experimentally induced high baseline inflammation. In the context of exercise, chapters 3, 4 and 5 support previous work that markers of plasma and peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) oxidative stress increase in response to acute exercise. Acute exercise (30-40 min, 70% VO2MAX) in rheumatoid arthritis patients caused a transient increase in protein carbonylation that over a period of training (3 months, 3 sessions per week) at the same intensity did not increase global oxidative stress or inflammation. Plasma 3-nitrotyrosine decreased with exercise training, alongside improvements in disease activity and aerobic fitness. The last two experimental chapters of this thesis explored acute changes in plasma (Chapter 4) and PBMC (Chapter 5) oxidative stress in response to bouts of low volume high intensity interval training (LV-HIIT) and steady state exercise (60% maximal oxygen consumption (VO2MAX), 27 minutes and 80% VO2MAX, 20 minutes). LV-HIIT provided an anti-inflammatory (IL-6 and IL-10) and anti-oxidant (plasma total antioxidant capacity and PBMC thioredoxin protein content) response to exercise that paralleled the response (magnitude and timecourse) observed with steady state exercise of high and moderate intensity.

The present thesis describes research that characterizes the mobilization of cytotoxic T cell subsets and monocyte populations in response to acute psychological stress and β-agonist (isoproterenol) infusion. Chapter two showed that γδ T cells are mobilized in response to psychological stress and isoproterenol infusion, implicating β-adrenergic mechanisms in this response. Chapter three demonstrated that γδ T cells that were tissue migrating (CD11ahi), of an effector memory phenotype (CD27 CD45RA+), and displaying NK-like features (CD94+), were most sensitive to stress induced mobilization. Chapter four showed that a perforin (pfn)+ C27 phenotype in CD4+, CD8+ and γδ T cells consistency identified cells most sensitive to stress and isoproterenol induced mobilization. However, although cytotoxicity (pfn+) was important, differentiation (CD27 ) status better predicted mobilization. Chapter five revealed that of the three major monocyte populations; CD14++CD16, C14++CD16+ and CD14+CD16+, the proinflammatory‟ CD14+CD16+ monocytes showed the largest mobilization response during stress and isoproterenol infusion. Thus, the selective mobilization of cells with a high effector ability applies to monocyte populations also. We speculate that mobilization of these leukocytes may represent an adaptive mechanism aimed at enhancing host immune defenses in times of threat. This response can have beneficial and detrimental effects depending on the inflammatory or infectious context.

This thesis investigated how propositions of the Revised Applied Model for Deliberate Imagery Use (RAMDIU) related to imagery ability. Chapter 2 and 3 established that PETTLEP imagery can improve the ease and vividness of internal, external and kinesthetic imagery of movements. Participants perceived the physical and environments elements of the PETTLEP model to be the most helpful for imaging easily and vividly. Chapter 4 investigated the use of these two elements in athletes’ ease of imaging five different types of sport imagery (i.e., skill, strategy, mastery, goal, and affect). The findings revealed positive associations between the use of physical and environment PETTLEP elements and ease of imaging all five imagery types. The findings of Chapters 2 to 4 suggest that the use of physical environment elements will likely result in greater ease of imaging cognitive and motivational imagery content and that the relationship between “What (type) & How” and “Imagery Ability” in the RAMDIU should be bi-directional. Chapter 5 explored the RAMDIU “Who” component by investigating whether emotion regulation in was associated with their sport imagery ability. Only emotional reappraisal was positively related with “Imagery Ability”. Overall, the thesis establishing that imagery ability can be influenced by the individual’s characteristics and how athletes image. Practitioners should consider athletes’ characteristics and how they are going to image to maximize the effectiveness of the imagery intervention in achieving the desired outcome(s).

The aim of the current thesis was to investigate coach narcissism as an antecedent of controlling and autonomy-supportive coach interpersonal styles proposed by self-determination theory (SDT); potential indirect effects that underlie those relations, and the outcomes of such coach interpersonal styles. The current thesis is comprised of a systematic review and three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 reviewed the literature on antecedents of controlling and need supportive interpersonal styles and identified narcissism as an antecedent of particular importance to sport coaching. This chapter has also illustrated a dearth of research investigating narcissism as an antecedent of coach interpersonal styles, which then became a key theme of the empirical studies that followed. Across these studies, narcissism was found to be positively associated with controlling interpersonal style in coaches (Chapters 3, 4, and 5), however it was not associated with autonomy-supportive style (Chapter 3). Some of these studies also revealed indirect effects (i.e., empathic concern, effectiveness beliefs about controlling interpersonal style) that helped explain the relation between narcissism and controlling interpersonal style (Chapters 3 and 5), and narcissism and autonomy-supportive interpersonal style (Chapter 3). Finally, coaches' controlling interpersonal style was associated with need frustration and positive attitudes toward doping in athletes (Chapter 4), and moral disengagement in coaches (Chapter 5). These novel finding extend SDT literature by offering further understanding on antecedents and outcomes of coach interpersonal styles.

The main aim of this thesis was to investigate the relationships between goal involvement and emotions and potential mediators and moderators of these relationships; a secondary aim was to examine the link between goal involvement and sport performance. The relationships between goal involvement and emotions experienced before, during, and after competition were examined in Studies 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Cognitive appraisals (Study 1) and perceived performance (Studies 2 & 3) were examined as mediators of the links between task involvement and emotions. Also, perceived competence (Study 1), perceived performance (Studies 2 & 3), and outcome of the match (Study 3) were investigated as moderators of the relationships between ego involvement and emotions. Finally, the effects of achievement goals on emotions and performance were experimentally tested in a speed-agility task (Study 4). Overall, task involvement was positively related to positive, and negatively associated with negative, emotions; challenge appraisal and perceived performance helped explain the majority of these links. Also, some relationships between ego involvement and emotions were moderated by perceived performance and outcome. These findings suggest athletes should be task involved before or during competition and that ego involvement can be beneficial for emotions when perceived performance is high.