This dissertation examines the moralization and beautification campaigns of Mexico City's mayor Ernesto P. Uruchurtu. As head of the Department of the Federal District from 1952-1966, his policies encouraged more popular housing, improved infrastructure, better transportation, cleaner markets, and safer streets. Uruchurtu also aimed to crack down on vice and beautify the city. He believed that through beautification and moralization the city would become safer, healthier, and more livable for all residents. Significantly, he promoted the expansion and improvement of parks, gardens, recreational facilities, the repairing and building of fountains, and the planting of trees and flowers, especially gladiolas. Living with more green and athletic spaces, urban dwellers would have the opportunity to improve physically and spiritually, and would feel inspired to lead more moral lives. Residents could then collectively come together to take pride in their city and generate a stronger sense of civic culture. Consequently, a new generation of youth would grow up in a healthier urban environment and promote national prosperity.This dissertation explores these policies and analyzes the debates surrounding Oscar Lewis's anthropological work, The Children of Sanchez, to highlight anxieties about the effects of urbanization, modernization, and industrialization on the capital's inhabitants. Following the book's publication in 1964, hundreds of articles appeared in newspapers and magazines responding to its subject matter; the intimate details about life for one "typical" poor family living in a slum tenement in the city's center. The debates underscored the uneven benefits of Uruchurtu's policies and offered insights into contradictory depictions of Mexico City: the prospering center of industrialization and growth, and the hub of poverty and despair. Responses to the book expressed how many of the poor experienced economic and political changes during the 1950s and 1960s. The debates also offered details about the cultural and social implications of Uruchurtu's administrative policies and provided a unique opportunity for an open public exchange about life in the capital.

This thesis explores the works of Oscar Wilde as they articulate and model an aesthetic of play. I show that Wilde distinguishes between true and false forms--or what I call models and anti-models--of play in a number of areas: art, criticism, and society, language, thought, and culture, self and other. My introduction establishes a context for the cultural value of play in the nineteenth century. I survey the ideas of Friedrich Schiller, who treats play in the aesthetic realm; Matthew Arnold, who discusses Criticism as a free play of the mind; Herbert Spencer, who explores play in the context of evolution; and Johan Huizinga, who analyses play in its social context. In my three chapters on Wilde's critical essays, I draw upon their ideas to describe Wilde's philosophy of play and examine how the form of Wilde's critical essays illuminates his aesthetic. My first chapter explores models and anti-models of play in Art, as they are described by Vivian in "The Decay of Lying." By exploring the role of "lying" in its aesthetic rather ethical context, Vivian demonstrates the value of the play-spirit for the development of culture. My second chapter discusses models and anti-models of play in Criticism as they are described by Gilbert in "The Critic as Artist." By refashioning the traditions of nineteenth-century criticism, Gilbert presents his own model of criticism as an aesthetic activity and demonstrates the role of the play-spirit in the development of the individual and the race. My third chapter relates models and anti-models of play in art, criticism, and social life to the modes of self-realization described by Wilde in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism." I take up Wilde's well-known paradox, that Socialism is a means of realizing Individualism, by showing how Wilde plays with these terms in an aesthetic rather than a political context. In the remaining chapters I read Wilde's fictional and dramatic texts in light of his aesthetics and treat the characters as models and anti-models of the play-spirit. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, I take the measure of play, not morality, as a guide for interpretation. In this reading Lord Henry Wotton is the novel's critic as artist, while Dorian Gray, with his literal-mindedness, his imitative instinct, and his ruthless narcissism, fails to achieve the aesthetic disinterestedness that characterizes true play. My sixth chapter traces themes related to play—game, ceremony, and performance—in Wilde's Society Comedies to demonstrate how these plays both reflect and critique the spectacle of Society and the conventions of nineteenth-century melodrama. My thesis concludes with The Importance of Being Earnest as it presents a culmination of Wilde's play-spirit and his playful linguistic strategies. I show how both the form and content of Earnest model the paradoxical ideal of play itself—that through play we may realize the experience of being at one with ourselves and on good terms with the world.

Thesis (M.T.S.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 1993. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-74).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [46]-47).

Thesis (D.Phil.)--University of Oxford, 2008. / Supervisor: Dr John Sloan. Bibliography: leaves 290-300.

Based on the author's dissertation. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-279) and index.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [46]-47).

Thesis (M. Phil. 95)--University of Hong Kong, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 160-170).

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

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1995. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [228]-248).