This study offers an analysis of the interaction between urban spaces and bohemian literature in Madrid around 1900. I argue that bohemianism and bohemian literature are actually part of a very well structured cultural discourse--a discourse of social resistance--and must be studied as such. At the same time, the obvious urban nature of this phenomenon is a deciding aspect of it. In order to know how the bohemian discourse evolved in Madrid from 1850s to 1920s--from Realism to Modernismo--we have to study the core and reciprocal relationship between bohemianism and the city. This issue has not yet been explored within Hispanism, in spite of the fact that it provides a very useful perspective for considering the period as a synthesis of intellectual and artistic matters.In my dissertation I engage the essential aspects of bohemianism in the turn of the twentieth century Spanish literature. I focus on the characterization and use of space in the bohemian discourse of Peninsular Modernismo. My starting point is the description and characterization of such a discourse as it has been constructed, analyzing how it takes form in a variety of different kind of texts. I study the construction and evolution of its "cartographic imaginary" (David Harvey), an image of the city that bohemian literature uses to resist the bourgeois order imposed on Madrid's urban spaces and the capitalistic process that supports it. I argue that bohemianism was taken by the peninsular version of Hispanic Modernismo as its central aesthetic discourse. Consequently, and because of the subaltern and marginal nature of it, Modernismo could never position itself at the central stage of the 1900s Spanish culture.

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

This study attempts to examine evolutionary theory and creationism objectively without engaging in an apology for or a criticism of either. It compares the presuppositions and assumptions of both systems, and examines the role of faith in religion and in the scientific theory of evolution. After discussing the nature of the scientific method and the development of the theory of evolution, the study explores the dichotomy of faith and reason, the ways in which these operate in theories of intelligent design and theistic evolution, and the question of whether scientific evolutionary theory can be considered to be a secular religion. The thesis argues that acceptance of the scientific theory of evolution is as dependent upon a faith commitment as is adherence to religion, though the type and quality of the two respective faith systems are very different and, therefore, worthy of comparison and contrast. The study concludes that, while science and evolutionary theory share many of the same features and characteristics of faith and presumption, it is presently not appropriate to claim that evolutionary theory is a secular religion, and that when this opinion is asserted it is worthwhile to analyze the motivation, conscious and unconscious, involved. / Thesis (PhD (Dogmatics))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus in association with Greenwich School of Theology, U.K., 2013.

This study attempts to examine evolutionary theory and creationism objectively without engaging in an apology for or a criticism of either. It compares the presuppositions and assumptions of both systems, and examines the role of faith in religion and in the scientific theory of evolution. After discussing the nature of the scientific method and the development of the theory of evolution, the study explores the dichotomy of faith and reason, the ways in which these operate in theories of intelligent design and theistic evolution, and the question of whether scientific evolutionary theory can be considered to be a secular religion. The thesis argues that acceptance of the scientific theory of evolution is as dependent upon a faith commitment as is adherence to religion, though the type and quality of the two respective faith systems are very different and, therefore, worthy of comparison and contrast. The study concludes that, while science and evolutionary theory share many of the same features and characteristics of faith and presumption, it is presently not appropriate to claim that evolutionary theory is a secular religion, and that when this opinion is asserted it is worthwhile to analyze the motivation, conscious and unconscious, involved. / Thesis (PhD (Dogmatics))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus in association with Greenwich School of Theology, U.K., 2013.

This dissertation argues that the crucial quality of American literary naturalism is the polemicism of its major authors and texts. Scholars have long been attuned to the “rebellious” nature of naturalism. Indeed, following the charge of H. L. Mencken (for whom naturalism constituted an aesthetic assault on the pious vacuities of Howellsian social realism), critics have been apt to frame naturalism as the national literature of disobedience. What is less than clear, however, is what, exactly, naturalism is supposed to be rebelling against. In a century of criticism, naturalism has constituted an assault on “machine industrialism” (Parrington), romantic imagination (Trilling), literary realism (Pizer), sentimentality (Lehan), regionalism and local color fiction (Campbell), feminization (Seltzer), capitalism (Benn Michaels), European aestheticism (Dudley), and patriarchal hegemony (Fleissner). My thesis builds on the assumption that the “real object” of naturalism’s rebellion is less definitive than the antinomian spirit itself. The naturalists, in short, were polemicists: naturalism is defined less by a coherent and stable philosophical orientation than by an attitude, a posture of aggressive controversy, which happens to cluster loosely around particular philosophical themes. Moreover, the conspicuous polemicism of the original naturalist project has been registered and extended in the critical construction of the genre over the past century. Naturalism has always depended upon polemical reconstruction by its critics, who were themselves feeding upon the palpable polemicism of Norris, Dreiser, et. al. In chapter one, I argue that the naturalists (and their critics) have adopted a self-effacing polemical rhetoric to establish the genre as the “central marginal” figure in the American canon. By emphasizing their own otherness to the American mainstream, the naturalists were, in effect, claiming it. Then, in close examinations of works by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright, I argue that the naturalists used their fiction to explore some of the most controversial political and cultural issues in modern American life. Scholars have long noticed how naturalism draws on the scientific theories of Darwin, Spencer, Sumner, Huxley, and others to challenge the prevailing Judeo-Christian cosmology. But the naturalists also charted the basic co-ordinates of a wide range of issues. So, my second chapter considers Frank Norris’s The Octopus in relation to emerging discourses of environmentalism and nascent anxieties over ecological despoliation. Chapter three considers the relationship between abortion and censorship in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and argues that the “tragedy” of Dreiser’s text hinges upon our understanding how its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is himself a work of art. In chapter four, I argue that Native Son’s chilling protagonist, Bigger Thomas, represents a distinctly modern figure for terror, and that the novel elaborates a disturbing complimentarity between terrorism and lynching as the crime and punishment that exist outside the confines of the law. While my project considers each of these polemical debates within the cultural and intellectual climates in which they emerged, it is also an attempt to engage with these ideas in their own spirit—that is, to situate naturalistic novels, polemically, within the highly fraught contexts they helped to invent.

This dissertation argues that the crucial quality of American literary naturalism is the polemicism of its major authors and texts. Scholars have long been attuned to the “rebellious” nature of naturalism. Indeed, following the charge of H. L. Mencken (for whom naturalism constituted an aesthetic assault on the pious vacuities of Howellsian social realism), critics have been apt to frame naturalism as the national literature of disobedience. What is less than clear, however, is what, exactly, naturalism is supposed to be rebelling against. In a century of criticism, naturalism has constituted an assault on “machine industrialism” (Parrington), romantic imagination (Trilling), literary realism (Pizer), sentimentality (Lehan), regionalism and local color fiction (Campbell), feminization (Seltzer), capitalism (Benn Michaels), European aestheticism (Dudley), and patriarchal hegemony (Fleissner). My thesis builds on the assumption that the “real object” of naturalism’s rebellion is less definitive than the antinomian spirit itself. The naturalists, in short, were polemicists: naturalism is defined less by a coherent and stable philosophical orientation than by an attitude, a posture of aggressive controversy, which happens to cluster loosely around particular philosophical themes. Moreover, the conspicuous polemicism of the original naturalist project has been registered and extended in the critical construction of the genre over the past century. Naturalism has always depended upon polemical reconstruction by its critics, who were themselves feeding upon the palpable polemicism of Norris, Dreiser, et. al. In chapter one, I argue that the naturalists (and their critics) have adopted a self-effacing polemical rhetoric to establish the genre as the “central marginal” figure in the American canon. By emphasizing their own otherness to the American mainstream, the naturalists were, in effect, claiming it. Then, in close examinations of works by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright, I argue that the naturalists used their fiction to explore some of the most controversial political and cultural issues in modern American life. Scholars have long noticed how naturalism draws on the scientific theories of Darwin, Spencer, Sumner, Huxley, and others to challenge the prevailing Judeo-Christian cosmology. But the naturalists also charted the basic co-ordinates of a wide range of issues. So, my second chapter considers Frank Norris’s The Octopus in relation to emerging discourses of environmentalism and nascent anxieties over ecological despoliation. Chapter three considers the relationship between abortion and censorship in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and argues that the “tragedy” of Dreiser’s text hinges upon our understanding how its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is himself a work of art. In chapter four, I argue that Native Son’s chilling protagonist, Bigger Thomas, represents a distinctly modern figure for terror, and that the novel elaborates a disturbing complimentarity between terrorism and lynching as the crime and punishment that exist outside the confines of the law. While my project considers each of these polemical debates within the cultural and intellectual climates in which they emerged, it is also an attempt to engage with these ideas in their own spirit—that is, to situate naturalistic novels, polemically, within the highly fraught contexts they helped to invent.

Thesis (M.A.)(Hons)--University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1996. / Bibliography: leaves 60-61.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 252-264). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2009. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1961. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.