This thesis attempts to show the ways in which governments treat opera as an institution, endorsing, through ceremony and ritual, the power of the state. Its main contention is that the opera institution (which combines opera companies and opera houses) is useful to the state and supported by it for reasons other than cultural. It will be argued that opera has performed these supra-artistic functions since its first performances, held as celebrations to commemorate important events in the ducal palaces of Italy in the 16th century. The institution of opera, and opera houses, have existed in England and France since the 17th century. Their remarkable permanence is investigated against the background of changing political and social events in those countries. Furthermore, in order to show that the hypothesis concerns the essential nature of opera and does not necessarily confine itself to the two countries investigated in detail, examples are given of state support of opera, in its European form, in other places. The argument is carried primarily by detailed investigation of the cultural histories of the states under examination, and by detailed exposition of the language which is used to describe opera. Thus the thesis rests on historical and cultural analysis, treating opera and opera-going primarily as a sociological phenomenon rather than as a musicological one. It has chosen not to deal with differences in repertoire, or with the differences in critical response to various opera productions, as it is a part of the argument that from the government perspective, details of stage performances are relatively unimportant. Of course the thesis does not deny that there will be many people who enjoy opera purely as an art, and who will make discriminating judgements between operatic performances, but insists that for nearly four centuries European governments have seen opera as transcending its artistic core, and have supported it for non-musical reasons. One important implication is that there exists a flaw in the reasons governments give for funding opera institutions. In the terminology of the 1990s they are presented as 'artistic flagships', in competition with other arts activities for state arts funding. If this argument is accepted, they should properly be excluded from any general 'arts budget', and should instead be financed by the same methods, and for the same reasons, as are other state palaces and state ceremonies.

Before the rise of the modern newspaper with its mass circulation in the 19th century, journalism was regarded as a branch of English letters. Journalism had universalized literature and enormously increased the number of readers. Many writers have succeeded in maintaining a fair balance between literary merit and success in the market through their serious literary contributions to newspapers and magazines. The writers themselves found in journalism an open platform to express themselves in essays or reviews as well as printing their works in serialized form so as to establish contact with their readers. The urgent need of the press in general for both entertainment and education in its content led to a demand for gifted writers which stemmed from a growing and increasingly discriminating audience. The early nineteenth century, was the flowering period of the great literary reviews which tended deliberately to select works, direct taste, criticise, judge and influence both the writers and their audience in the literary process of communication. Long before The Tatler and The Spectator newspapers and periodicals had begun to attract essay writers and to use them as authors of leading articles. Some of the papers, instead of featuring news, disseminated views or information on popular subjects or reviews of books, laying the foundation of modern periodical literature in Britain, while much early literature, itself, was accessible through early reviews and journals. The essay in its turn developed towards the review, in line with the nature and function of the great periodicals of the 19th century. The slashing style of the Edinburgh Review marked the beginning of a new style of journalism. Reviewing began to establish and set the limits of an integral type or species of journalism. At the time when Lamb, Hazlitt and their contemporary Romanticists, became outmoded in their own country, there was a growing interest overseas in their achievements. In the spreading of English Romanticism and literature to the Arabic world it was Egyptian journalists who played the major role. The forceful influence of the English essayists revealed itself in the works of al- Aqqad, al- Mäzini, Müsa, and their contemporaries. The effect of English literature has been noticeable in the Saxon School of Egyptian Writers who were referred to as the Diwan Group whose influence was widespread.

In this work, the various factors influencing the production of news analysed in the international news theory writings acted as a base for in-depth examination of the Greek newspaper and news Internet market. Influences on news writings were found to range from politics, economics and news media ownership, to newsroom organisation, journalistic practices and routines, ethics, journalist-sourcer elations and social stereotypes. From the history of the Greek newspaper market, it is made clear that the evolution of journalism and the newspaper market was directly affected by political developments in which party politics always played a dominant role. Similarly, the evolution of the human factor was marked by the country's particularities, some of which are deeply associated with today's distortions and inefficiencies in the journalism profession. The close examination of Greek newspaper journalists brought into surface particular aspects of the profession, such as daily professional tasks, routines and practices, which along with the analysis of newspapers internal organisational environmental s well as of external pressures, have offered a valuable insight of the major influences on news and its making. The primary aim was to approach journalists and newsroom processes in order to define the degree to which the quality of human resources and the power of news organisations influence the way journalism is practiced in Greece. In this framework, the extensive analysis of economic and business reporting offered a view of how Greek journalists actively participated in the bull-bear situation in the Greek stock exchange in the late 1990s. Finally, analysing news making processes in some of the largest Greek Internet news sites revealed significant drawbacks towards the creation of a new type of journalism. The limited will and ability of local digital newsrooms to explore the particular aspects of web journalism, in combination with the traditional deficiencies of professional journalism in the country synthesise an environment that lacks innovation and dynamism.

This thesis focuses on the lived experience of a group of post-graduate drama students as they undergo a one year vocational Master of Arts in Acting at a major London Drama School. It attempts to understand why mature and well qualified adults sacrifice financially rewarding and secure employment in order to train for an industry in which they have little chance of even a subsistence level of paid employment in the years following graduation. The project was conducted from a non-positivistic basis where knowledge, truth and reality are seen as the subjective, context-bound, normative and political products of a social community, and not as the value-neutral products of a disinterested researcher. The research design was based on a series of 14 extended semi-structured interviews with current and ex-students, formal participant observation over a period of a year, and both formal and solicited documentary evidence covering a four year period. The epistemology is phenomenological. It is a descriptive, hermeneutic, longitudinal, single case study and a reflexive commentary on the research process. Data are presented in two forms; firstly through themes and elements in relationship to the relevant literature, and secondly as a dramadocumentary screenplay, charting the experience of the students as they progress through the course. The findings suggest that the participants are searching for selfactualisation through personal integrity and a creative purpose. The research proposes that face-to-face relationships, reflexive and sensitive pedagogy, a permissive, non-judgemental ‘safe space’ and the disciplined development of the histrionic sensibility through the study of action is productive in developing individuals able to selfactualise and flourish creatively within the increasing demands and conflicting ideologies of a highly competitive creative industry.

This thesis considers certain critical moments in the writing about art in modernity. I firstly identify key exemplars as responses to a "crisis of representation" within a broadly conceived discipline of art history in Britain. These mark significant turns in the discipline, one towards a newly invigorated Marxist social history of art in the 1980's and one towards an increasingly philosophical mode of investigating aesthetic works. Whilst the latter can be said to have most impact after the 1980's, key aspects of the actual object of study pre-date this. The exemplars in the first two parts of the thesis are the writing of the British art historian T.J. Clark, principally in respect of his critical work, writing on Manet's painting of Olympia in the article first published in the British journal Screen in 1980 and the writings on the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, a film which dates from 1959 and not only documented by its script writer, Marguerite Duras at the time, but subject to critical readings within film theory and testimony studies in the 1990s, drawing upon particularly modern French philosophical thought. I examine how these exemplars present the relationship between aesthetics and politics but also the extent to which the paradigms by which they think that relation can be shown to come up against their own limits. I consider the challenges these exemplars presented to other modes of disciplinary thinking; Clark's Marxist criticism was part of a major politicisation of the discipline of art history and the film Hiroshima Mon Amour in itself and supported by Duras's script presented a major challenge to documentary and "memorial" cinema. But I argue that they return us to thinking the political or the historical in foundational or other essentialist ways under which the aesthetic is subsumed. It is by way of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy and critical thinkers influenced by them that I have problematised these exemplars. Derrida and Nancy have provided an approach which whilst respecting the criticality of the tradition, shows where that criticality meets its limits and forecloses on its questioning and openness to the potential 'other' in the aesthetic and the political, out of which there emerges a responsibility to continue to think the relation between aesthetics and politics. In addition, to deepen the context through which I invoke Derrida and Nancy and to offer historical insights to inform current critical concerns within the disciplines of art history, the thesis examines the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin in relation to art and politics and technology written in the 1930s. Heidegger's influence especially is fundamental to Derrida's and Nancy's thought but it is from the contrasting outcomes of Heidegger's and Benjamin's thoughts on art and technology that lessons may be drawn in respect of critical issues for contemporary politics and culture. The final chapter refers to some of these critical issues as part of a re-iteration of the contemporary importance of reading art 'otherwise' in the wake of a perceived waning of relevance of 'critical theory'.

The original research carried out in a range of arts organisations in the UK included employees at every level within both commercial and subsidised performing arts organisations in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It demonstrates that bullying in UK performing arts organisations is common and increasing in frequency: it is damaging, oppressive and unacceptable. Clear evidence is presented of the failure of management satisfactorily to address bullying: some arts workers tolerate intimidating behaviour by powercut managers because they believe in, and are committed to, the Arts. Among managers, the notion of the arts as vocaffon persists. The widespread perception is that arts organisations work outside the rules and limitations of the ordinary milieu, choosing to work in theatres and arts centres rather than in offices, factories and shops, and that the arts are different and exempt from normal rules and regulations. The research found that many aspects of working in the performing arts are not peculiar to the profession, they occur in other employment sectors and are more likely to be characteristic of the times in which we live, than specific to the sector in which we work. In assessing workplace stressors, it is the response of the organisation, alongside the individual response, that determines negative stress levels. The apportionment of responsibility for successful resolution of negative behaviours within arts organisations is examined. The need to develop suitable policies for dealing with bullying is highlighted. The nature of the behaviour, its effects on individuals and organisations and the role of the perpetrator are outlined. The experience of, and steps taken by, other countries are examined, notably Australia, Canada, France, Sweden and the United States where the profile of bullying behaviour continues to be featured regularly in the press and media, although not yet in the performing arts.

The thesis combines cultural heritage management and museology as 'western constructs' in their Moroccan context, which has deeply shaped by French colonialism. and still remains captive of that legacy. The research explores all aspect of the concept of sustainable development and investigates the accession and the mainstreaming of culture and cultural heritage into the World Bank development portfolio with particular emphasis on the Fa Medina Rehabilitation Programme as it embodies the World Bank's attempts to consolidate cultural heritage as part of sustainable development. Furthermore, the research study also attempts to historically and aesthetically 'ground' the museum concept in non-western environment by focusing on the pertinent questions of representation, collection care, professionalism and commodification. And critically looks at the suitability of the ecomuseum model as an alternative to orthodox museology.

The English art critic and curator David Sylvester (1924-2001) played a significant role in the formation of taste in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. Through his writing, curating and other work Sylvester did much to shape the reputations of, and discourse around, important twentieth century artists including Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore and René Magritte. At the same time his career is of significant sociohistorical interest. On a personal level it shows how a schoolboy expelled at the age of fifteen with no qualifications went on to become a CBE, a Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the first critic to receive a Leone d'Oro at the Venice Biennale, assembling a personal collection of artworks worth millions of pounds in the process. In terms of the history of post-war art more broadly, meanwhile, Sylvester's criticism provides a way of understanding developments in British art and its relation to those in Paris and New York during the 1950s and 1960s. This thesis provides the first survey of Sylvester's entire output as an art critic across different media and genres, and makes a case for him as a commentator of comparable significance to Roger Fry, Herbert Read, and other British critics who have already received significant scholarly attention. I take a twofold approach, analysing both the quality of Sylvester's writing and criticism, and its function as a catalyst for furthering the careers of artists and instigating significant exhibitions. Common to all of these strands is Sylvester's distinctive critical sensibility, which placed an emphasis on his own aesthetic experiences and how they could be articulated through criticism.

This thesis interrogates a number of issues that surround what critics have designated ‘film noir’ and its relationship to that branch of modern American literature identified as ‘hard- boiled fiction’. Thus, the main subject matter for the thesis consists of selected films noirs from 1944—46, and the novels of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler. The thesis argues that the adaptation process is of central significance to the ‘film noir’ debate and to film noir itself. While it argues for a dialogic exchange between ‘noir’ and ‘hard-boiled fiction’, it proposes as well that there was also a fundamental incompatibility between the two modes. The thesis discusses the difficulties encountered by Hollywood studios in adapting Cain’s work due to the candid representation of ‘adult’ themes, and how this conflicted with Hollywood censorship, carried out by the Production Code Administration (PCA). In order for Cain’s fiction to be adapted, it is argued, Hollywood conventions regarding the representation of sex and violence and the PCA guidelines by which they were governed had to undergo radical change. The critical and scholarly contexts for this argument include debates concerning influence, censorship, and the involvement of the PCA with the adaptation process, and the notion, as maintained by elements within the revisionist debate, that ‘film noir’ has no conceptual or theoretical basis. The thesis challenges revisionist arguments that ‘noir’ was ‘invented’ by French critics in 1946, and argues that although the genre was named retrospectively, generic practice was established by Hollywood producers in acts of ‘applied criticism’ prior to production, from around 1944 onwards. The thesis contextualises the generic practice of ‘noir’ within the history of film, while arguing simultaneously for historic changes in Hollywood film-making of the mid-1940s in terms of the representation of ‘adult’ themes, and the relaxation of the Production Code. The thesis discusses how criticism has tended to privilege other media, such as the plastic arts and literature, over film, and argues that notions of artistic style and influence must give consideration to the immanence of the film production context. The notion that ‘noir’ was influenced by the artistic movement known as ‘German Expressionism’ has been questioned by the revisionist debate. The thesis examines and discusses key German films of the Weimar period, when the artistic movement ‘Expressionism’ flourished, arguing that the Weimar influence is discernible in the generic practice of ‘noir’. However, the thesis makes a case that this is, primarily, the legacy of Weimar cinema, and that the influence of ‘Expressionism’ should be discussed within this medium-specific context. The thesis examines the connections between the work of a number of influential directors and the signifying practice of ‘noir’, including Murnau, Lang, Hitchcock and Hawks. It is proposed that certain ‘noir’ conventions can be traced back to the work of these influential directors. The thesis proposes a way of understanding ‘film noir’ as a genre, and argues that the adaptation process needs to be seen as a nexus for various discourses, including directorial style, screenwriting, cinematography, the studio system, and censorship, in addition to the relationship between the film and the novelistic text.

Over the last thirty years there has been a proliferation in the number and diversity of privately- funded exhibition spaces for contemporary art in Mexico. Driving this development is a new generation of art collectors and my research project is concerned with how collector-led models of patronage have influenced the recognition, impact and public display of contemporary art in Mexico. My thesis begins by exploring what constitutes an art collection, the significance of a museum, and what motivates a collector. I then present an overview of the historical relationship between state and private art collections in Mexico, followed by a critique of landmark events in the genesis of the Mexican art market. In the second part of my research project I identify a group of influential mid-twentieth century collectors who established their own exhibition spaces in order to share their collections with the public, followed by an analysis of their legacy through the activity of the current generation of collectors, whose efforts to promote contemporary art within Mexico and abroad have spawned a new climate of creative enterprise and collaboration. This thesis seeks to present a survey of the evolution of the private exhibition space in Mexico by examining independent cultural initiatives whose ambition is to change the way the public engages with contemporary art. In my findings I examine how collectors’ objectives manifest a vision for the museum visitor experience and the impact of these privately-funded institutions on Mexico’s cultural identity.