This thesis has two foci: the development of a National Socialist anti-­ Jewish cultural policy and the processes of internal Jewish community cultural self-­representations. At the most basic level it is an organisational history of the Jewish Kulturbund in Bavaria between 1934 and 1938. Ultimately, however, the thesis is about the people: the artists, how they employed certain mediums for specific uses and how these events were received. The Kulturbund was the lone state approved Jewish cultural organisation in Nazi Germany; it was, in other words, the only public space for Jewish cultural performance and consumption. Activity began in Berlin in the summer of 1933 and expanded to cities, towns and villages throughout the country. Unlike the majority of these early branches, however, the Jewish Kulturbund in Bavaria developed independently of Berlin's main offices. Bavarians maintained autonomous control of their cultural league until the autumn of 1935. Organised Bavarian Jewish cultural life was 'liquidated' upon official state orders after 9 November 1938. This thesis analyses the Kulturbund programme as an internal projection of willed identity for Bavarian Jews. Kulturbund events - particularly in the early seasons when National Socialist censorship was ill-defined and haphazardly enforced - reflected the ways its membership chose to stage their own understandings of what it meant, to them, to be 'Jewish'. It was a process of dissimilation and internal community building that helped its membership navigate their experiences of political persecution and social flux. What developed in the Bavarian programme from February 1934 until November 1938 was a representation of 'Jewishness' that was self-described as both religious- and heritage-based with a regional bent.

The purpose of this thesis has been to use tragedy to discover conceptions about mental and emotional processes reflected in contemporary language which, though it may not have been used throughout the society in the particular forms tragedy uses, was understood, and felt to be powerful, by the contemporary audiences of the plays. Through detailed examination of the type of imagery used in thinking about the mind, various inferences have been made about conceptions of the sources of harmful emotion and about the ways in which men judge each other, how they sympathize with each other, and how far they can understand each other's private feelings, in a society which may have been in these respects very different from our own. The material has been confined to tragedy - though parallels from other poets and evidence of particular beliefs and theories have been sought in archaeological data, medicine, philosophy and history - since tragedy, is for two reasons, particularly suitable for a study of this kind. First, the process of watching a tragedy involves observation aid evaluation of other people from their actions; the audience is invited to react to and ponder the implications of different 'serious actions' the imitation of which is included in Aristotle's definition of tragedy. Secondly, tragedy is a musical event which offers in different musical patterns the expression and resolution of extreme emotions; and one of the main points to emerge in this thesis is Greek fears of unrhythmical and uncontrollable emotion. The images associated with emotion are those of savage daemons and wild beasts. As on the mythological level Orpheus could control wild beasts by the power of his music, on the social and dramatic level music, which imposes order, rhythm and harmony on those listening to it and performing it, can calm extreme emotions in ritual and in tragedy, of which it is an essential part. Chapter One: In the Mind. This chapter examines statements about the composition of the mind in tragedy: the different mental organs, located deep within the hitman body, their movement in relation to each other, and their 'darkness'. The images which express the activity of the mind disturbed include: shaking and trembling, filling, swelling and inflammation; wave, storms, wind and breath. The dreams that visit the mind are imagined as coming out of the earth; but the 'muchos' of the mind is implcitly compared to the underground darkness in which the blind seer lives. The mind itself is imagined to be 'prophetic'. The imagery of wave and storm, drawn from the world outside to express feelings within the mind, suggests the easy association of the components of the natural world and the components of the mind; an association demonstrated in the theories of Presocratics and Hippocratic writers. Finally, the supreme fear is fear of the mind 'adrift': the motif of the 'wandering mind' is reflected in the geographical wandering of mad figures in myth. Their activities and feelings are expressed in images and pursuit: of the goad, yoke, and whip. Chapter Two: Into the Mind. This chapter explores the outside sources of mental harm. Passions that trouble the mind are expressed and described with the help of imagery, and the imagery draws mainly on the outside world: on the daemons of cult and fantasy, and on the wild animals who endanger man physically. Part A considers the shapes of persecution, culturally-determined, which provide models for the individual imagination. The Olympian gods, their winged weapons; the Erinyes, their goads and love of blood; the Gorgon, her piercing eye; the Sphinx, her claws and dangerous song; the animals, the 'death-bringers', particularly the bull, horse, dog, lion and snake. Part B examines the images of emotion themselves: wings and piercing weapons; rays of the eye; driving and blows; hunting and ambush; wrestling and capture (human imagery); biting and eating (animal imagery); and imagery from the natural world, wind, wave, fire, storm. Chapter Three: Into And Out Of The Mind. The material studied so far suggests a world-view which emphasizes the external source of human emotion and pain. But some images, some forms of theory, some direct atatements in tragedy (and elsewhere at this period) suggests that another world-view also operated within the imagination; that the source of human emotion and disease lay within man himself. For various reasons, not least emotional comfort, this view is not canvassed as widely, nor does it affect language and belief as powerfully, as the first. There are areas of experience, however, where it is important, and particularly in ideas about madness and demonic possession. Madness in tragedy is presented as a temporary event which passes and leaves the man 'himself' again. The case for belief in demonic possession at this period, which has been challenged recently, is reconsidered; and the implications of demonic possession and inspiration are discussed, of the external and internal sources of power good and bad. Examples are collected of the recognition in tragedy of the projection process, lay which the mind projects its own feelings, particularly the dangerous ones, outside into the world. The psychoanalytic concept of projection is outlined, and the role it has played in psychologically-oriented medical history: particularly in Paracelsus and Freud. Fifth-century medical theories are examined: theories of the origin of the physical and mental disease. These invoke both external sources of harm, and internal ones. In medicine and poetry alike the two views, though apparently paradoxical, operate in a complementary way, since belief is shifting and inconstant in societies and individuals alike. There are parallels in Anthropological material for the complementary relation of inconsistent world views: and the tendency of theorists has always been to divide mental functioning into two types (compare theories which divide mental structures, and divide them into three). Chapter Four: Out Of The Mind. This chapter considers the actions that express emotion. These are of two kinds, the individual actions of which tragedy is composed (considered in chapter five), and involuntary and ritualized actions, which may have sons universal physiological basis but which are also culturally determined. The natural process of observation - 'opsis' - is replaced in tragedy by words (eg 'Why are you pale?'). Physical reactions to emotion mentioned in tragedy are collected, and deductions made by observers about the internal feelings which produce such reactions. Parallels from medicine are considered: the importance of observation in medical theory and practice has given us a picture of the physical symptoms of physical disease which resemble the physical symptoms of emotion recorded in tragedy. There are dangers in taking physical symptoms recorded in poetry too literally (illustrated by a study of Sappho fr. 31), but though the poetic expression of such symptoms is affected by dictates of convention and genre, it does provide evidence for the tendencies of observation and reaction accepted in the whole society, if not for the single 'true' experience of a lyric poet. Tragedy: the main feature in physical symptoms of emotion and madness is a terrifying unrhythmical violence, which corresponds to the wild movements of the pursuing daemons in Chapter two, and the wild twisting movements in the images of the mind of Chapter one. The principle of projection, discussed in Chapter three, is working here, projecting the wild movements of the body of the man suffering intense emotions, onto both his imagined pursuers, and the unseen organs of his mind. Ritualized expression of emotion is an attempt to impose order, rhythm and control on this violence. The ritual expression of grief, the emotion which occurs most often in tragedy, tries to control emotion in two ways.

This thesis examines the forms and functions of self-consciousness in contemporary Gothic fiction. Though self-consciousness is an often-mentioned characteristic of Gothic writing, it has yet to be explored in sufficient depth. In particular, critics have failed to recognise the manner in which the myriad forms of textual and generic self-reflexivity at work contribute to the fiction’s fearful agenda: how self-consciousness in the Gothic is itself Gothicised. This thesis argues that, rather than being an ancillary quirk of generic coherence or an indication of creative exhaustion, self-consciousness has become an integral part of the genre’s terroristic project, a new source and representational mode of terror. In the wake of postmodern and post-structural theory, the genre’s longstanding interest in reading, writing and textuality has been renewed, re-contextualised and redeployed as a key feature of the Gothic ‘effect’. My original contribution to knowledge is a charting of the intersections between the Gothic and this critical perspective on the text. In particular I explore how the Barthesian reorientation of the text is redeployed in Gothic fiction as a source of terror. Rather than pursuing an author-centric division of chapters I have organised the thesis around types of self-conscious commentary that occur throughout the contemporary Gothic. These are: a focus on the process of writing and textual composition; the internalisation and Gothicised representation of critical theory; an acute awareness and meta-commentary on the critical and commercial contexts of Gothic; and intertextuality. Key texts include Stephen King’s Misery (1987), Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted (2005), A.N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost (2005), R. M. Berry’s Frank (2005) and Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008). This selection of texts is representative of a varied but coherent inward turn in the Gothic fiction of recent decades. It is, however, by no means exhaustive and supplementary evidence will be provided from additional texts. Equally, it is important to contextualise this contemporary turn in relation to an established vein of self-consciousness in the Gothic, present since its inception. As such, my approach is firstly to trace a lineage of reflexivity and to draw upon that tradition in demonstrating how contemporary Gothic writers have honed this technique to a uniquely terrifying purpose.

This dissertation examines how honor was fashioned in the New South by examining the masculine roles performed by William Greene Raoul, Jr. Raoul wrote his autobiography in the mid-1930s and in it he reflected on his life on the New South's frontier at the turn of the century as change came to the region in all aspects of life: politically, economically, socially, sexually, and racially. Raoul was an elite son of the New South whose memoirs, "The Proletarian Aristocrat," reveals a man of multiple masculinities, each with particular ways of retrieving his past(s). The paradox of his title suggests the parallel organization of Raoul's recollections. The "aristocrat" framed the events of a lifetime through a lens of honor, sustained by southern gentlemen who restrained masculine impulses on the one hand and avoided dependency on the other. Raoul the "proletarian" cast honor through an ideological retrospective whereby traumatic memories of disappointment and failure were re-fashioned through a distinctly politicized view constructed rather than recalled. Raoul's business failures led him to re-conceptualize masculine honor as a quality possessed more by the emerging working class than the rising commercial class. Memory operates in this project as more than mere methodology as assumptions about access to the past through memory are subordinated to an examination of the meaning of the memories rehearsed by Raoul. Raoul wrote his autobiography at a bittersweet moment in his life. While his personal fortune had been nearly wiped out by the stock market crash of October 1929, he clearly looked back on his career in the New South as a committed radical with delight as the Great Depression called into question the legitimacy of the capitalist system that he had long held responsible for his own professional failures in a variety of endeavors, from the cotton-mill industry to box-car building and from saw manufacturing to a practicing accountant. Raoul converted to Socialism in part to join what he regarded as society's most progressive and virile force. It is these two voices, the proletarian and the aristocrat, that are under examination here.

Ma Shouzhen (1548-1604) was a cultured courtesan who lived in the famous pleasure quarter along the Qinhuai River in Nanjing, the southern capital of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). She was talented in dance and music, painting and poetry, and surprisingly for her time, she was also a playwright. Although she was a celebrity of the prolific Nanjing cultural milieu and there is a good corpus of extant material by and about her, the particular contribution of Ma Shouzhen - her character and her work - have been marginalised, or even neglected, by the previous scholarship. This thesis is a cross-disciplinary study of Ma Shouzhen and is the first in-depth scholarly investigation into the entirety of her activities. It employs material and methods traditionally pertaining to the disciplines of sinology, history, art history, literary and drama studies. The thesis has a dual aim: first, to provide a nuanced understanding of the courtesan, her cultural production and social practice; second, to reclaim the agency and legacy of her character within the cultural milieu of late Ming Nanjing and beyond. These aims will be achieved through two main research objectives: (1) recovering and re-evaluating visual and written sources by and about the courtesan; (2) investigating those sources in order to comprehend her modes of self-representation and strategies of self-fashioning, analysed especially through the lens of gender. The main body of the thesis is composed of an introduction, five core chapters, and an epilogue; the chapters are structured so as to provide as complete a picture of Ma Shouzhen as possible. Chapter Two explores the space of the pleasure quarter, Ma’s biography and its entwinement within the complexities of the historical moment. Chapter Three focuses on her painting, Chapter Four considers her poetry, and Chapter Five explores her theatre practice; Chapter Six extends the investigation to focus on the construction of Ma’s historical character in later decades. In its content and aims, this thesis contributes to women’s and gender history, as well as to studies in visual culture and literature.

This diploma thesis reveals the processes of shaping the image of Emil František Burian, the theater director, composer, journalist and playwright in three key headings. The first heading explains the principles of self-presentation and choice of characteristic means to build its external image in the changing personal attitudes and social development in the 30th - 50 years of 20th century. The second heading shows the coordinates of cultural policy communist regime and monitors the construction of public image representative of official socialist culture. Both headings are mainly based on a detailed analysis of Burian's theater activity, broadcasting activities and articles in professional and social printing. The third heading of qualification work pays attention to creating individual memory of a systematic effort to build a "cult of personality" of E. F. Burian. Interpretation biography and memories of actors, directors, journalists and politicians attempts to profile the professional and private life of this artist.